


you're human tonight

by chrysalizzm



Series: young god [1]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: (its minecraft theyre gonna fight), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Dream Smp, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Reveal, Platonic Relationships, Queerplatonic Relationships, Temporary Character Death, They/Them Pronouns for Eret (Video Blogging RPF), Unconventional Relationship, there had to be some
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:46:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 65,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27408277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrysalizzm/pseuds/chrysalizzm
Summary: Twenty-two times Dream absolutely did not act like a human in front of his people, and one time he didn’t have to worry about that.(And while doing so starts wars, ends wars, lets people sleep on him, contributes to some pranks, causes mass destruction, rebuilds monuments, and saves a pet or two.)
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s)
Series: young god [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1999633
Comments: 926
Kudos: 2714
Collections: fanfictions that are mad luxurious👑





	1. fundy (an inkling)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i’m allowed to have headcanons, and one of them is that dream the character has a slightly weak left arm because he relies heavily on it for shieldwork and it takes heavier hits because of that; he needs to rest it more often and i tend to draw him with a bandaged left arm at all times partly because it looks cool and partly because of this headcanon. it’s not actually that relevant in this chapter but like. chronic injury. is he a minor god? yes. but is he kind of more human ironically because of this? YES

It’s all fun and games until Fundy loses control of the redstone-powered iron golem he was jury-rigging and it goes on a rampage, tearing through his compound. 

Fundy, screaming his stupid head off and probably waking up all of his neighbors at fuck-all-o’clock in the morning, books it to Dream’s bunker door and pounds on it, shrieking, “Dream!! Dream, open the fucking door!! _Dream please I’m begging you - ”_

The door kicks open at him, and Fundy narrowly avoids getting his nose clipped off by it. Dream’s dishevelled hair greets him on the threshold, and a second later, so does the downturn of his mouth. “Fundy? It’s - ” he glances over his shoulder, “ - three? In the morning. What is it.” His voice hasn’t lost its somnolent rasp, but it’s also taken on a distinctly miffed tone, which, okay, Fundy gets it, but also, he’s his fiancé, so you’d think he’d be more understanding. 

He says as much, and Dream rolls his eyes so hard that Fundy can tell he does it even under his mask. “The only reason I agreed to your proposal,” he says, sounding like his patience is being tried, “is because you’re my friend and I like you.” 

“Ouch,” mutters Fundy. It’s not really that heartbreaking of a statement - the people Dream allows to roam his world (which is an entirely different can of worms - Fundy wonders which minor god Dream had to bribe/play guard dog for/murder in order to make Dream SMP happen) are all people Dream likes, and all of their complicated little quote-unquote “relationships”, so intertwined by this point that the threads connecting them are impossible to navigate, are largely made up of close friendships and queerplatonic relationships. Maybe Fundy filed for civil union because Dream’s one of his favorite people. So what? It’s Dream’s world, they all do whatever they want, mostly flying smack in the face of societal standards. All’s fair in love and war and whatnot. 

“Anyway, that’s not important right now!” Fundy waves off the semantics and returns to his earlier panic. “Dream, you gotta help me kill something.”

Dream gives Fundy a long, long look. “...Call Sapnap, then.”

“You’re the creator, you’ve got more power than him!”

After another deadpan silence, Dream sighs like the weight of the world is on him and says long-sufferingly, “Alright, what is it?”

His sentence is neatly punctuated by the powerful swing of an iron golem’s arm into the doorway. 

Fundy screams and dances out of the way of the shower of splinters; Dream, with his sharper reflexes, dives and does a shoulder roll out onto his front lawn. The punch got the iron-redstone golem’s arm stuck in Dream’s door frame, and as it tugs listlessly at its limb, Fundy shimmies past it and joins Dream where he remains crouched, staring blankly at Fundy’s creation gone awry, probably still tired enough to lack the brainpower to process the turn of events. His hair is all loose and puffy onto his shoulders, pressed close to his head on one side. Fundy says on impulse and completely irrelevantly, “You need a haircut.”

Dream turns his stare onto Fundy. “You are unbelievable,” he replies. “What the hell’s this? And why’re you making it at the asscrack of dawn?”

“I... may have lost track of time.”

“I invited too many mad scientists to this world,” Dream sighs under his breath. He stands, pats his waist, then sighs again, louder. Fundy has to hold back a laugh despite the mildly life-threatening situation they’re in - Dream habitually keeps his netherite sword at his right hip and a diamond axe on his left, and failing that, almost always has a shield on him. But it’s three AM and Fundy just dragged Dream out of bed to kill a Frankenstein’s monster and all he’s got on him is plaid pajama pants and a bright green t-shirt two sizes too big. 

The iron-redstone golem finally wrenches its arm from Dream’s wall and pivots sluggishly to face them. It’s much taller than the average iron golem and the telltale glint of redstone twines up its body instead of the usual flowering vines; Fundy had wanted to augment innate iron golem power and potentially create guardians for the countries to use as needed, but, well. That backfired spectacularly. Fundy swallows the sting of disappointment with relative ease. You live and learn, after all.

Dream rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck with brutal efficiency. Fundy winces at how loud he pops his knuckles. “Okay, so how strong did you make it?”

The golem whips its arm out, a warning shot. The mountainside quite literally trembles. 

“...Don’t answer that.” Dream takes a few confident paces back, keeping his eyes on the thing; Fundy shuffles backward beside him, trying to keep as much distance between himself and his enraged creation as possible. When his heel hits a tree, Dream whirls around, swiftly knocks out two logs of it, fashions those into sticks, sets down a slightly lopsided crafting table, and picks a wooden sword from it. The entire process must take twenty seconds, tops.

“That was pretty cool,” Fundy tells him, heartfelt. Dream waves off the compliment graciously and focuses once more on the golem, which is starting to shamble toward them, dragging its overlong arms in the grass. They both shift into fighting stances, Dream like a coiled spring and Fundy like a newborn fawn. It’s not a bad teamup for the situation at hand, since Fundy knows the structure of the iron-redstone golem like the back of his hand and Dream’s a combat genius for all that he pushes the title off onto Techno; that said, Fundy’s got the grace of bowling pins staring down a bowling ball. He realizes this fact about himself when he takes one step to the side as the golem rushes them and he somehow manages to trip on an outcropped root and go sprawling to the forest floor.

Every survival instinct in his ape brain screeches at Fundy to get up and roll out of the way, but his foot is properly stuck, and when he pulls his head out of the ground to see the golem bearing down on him with the inevitability of a freight train, he kind of accepts temporary death. He can barely even hear Dream’s cry of _“Fundy!!”_ over the roaring in his ears.

His vision, however, is in perfectly proper working order, and he sees the moment Dream plants his feet and grits his teeth and sweeps his unarmed hand out at the golem, clenching his hand into a fist.

The ensuing explosion is a bit too close for comfort. Fundy yelps and plants his face back into the dirt, covering his head with his arms, as the _crack-boom_ of something bursting into smithereens echoes up into the night air. The redstone-fire singes some of the fur off his legs and a solid chunk of his tail, but when Fundy chances a look up again, his ears aren’t ringing, and his head is untouched, which is a major win in his book.

The iron-redstone golem is little more than a smoldering crater now, with the occasional lump of metal discernible strewn across the clearing, in the trees and some wedged into the mountainside. The grass around the epicenter is scorched, but no fires have caught, thank whatever god was keeping an eye on the situation. All in all, the scenery looks a mess, but it’s not as bad as it could have been, so Fundy heaves a sigh of relief and gingerly extricates his leg from the root and looks around for Dream.

Said hunter has slumped against an oak in an ungraceful heap, gasping for breath. Concern sends Fundy scrambling to him and checking his breath, patting him down with shaking hands even though the thought of a gory wound makes him want to be sick, but Dream seems fine save the sweat on his face and the near-white pallor of his skin. Just to be sure, though, Fundy takes Dream’s hands and walks him through the good old-fashioned “breathe in for ten, out for ten” until he’s sure Dream’s not going to pass out if Fundy tries to make him walk.

“You okay?” he asks gently, when Dream finally sucks in a breath that doesn’t sound awful and rattly in his chest. 

“Yeah,” Dream manages, pressing a hand to his chest and tilting his head back to rest against the tree trunk. “Yeah, I’m good, sorry to make you worry.”

“I’m the one who should be sorry!” The events of the last half-hour catch up to Fundy all of a sudden, and the remains of the golem plastered over every available surface do nothing to alleviate the faint guilt that’s starting to worm its way into him. “That was my golem. If you hadn’t - if you hadn’t, uh, done what you did - ”

Dream’s left hand is over Fundy’s mouth in a flash, far quicker than he should be able to move after recovering from a spell like that. Fundy blinks first at Dream, then at his arm, which is shaking pretty badly. “Dream?” he says, confused, his words smothered.

Dream shakes his head. “Don’t - tell anyone - about the whole - _exploding_ thing,” he hisses breathlessly. Then, with a hesitation so minute Fundy wouldn’t’ve noticed it if he hadn’t been paying attention, “I plant - a lot of - TNT pressure plates - around my base. Don’t want - people - poking around.”

Fundy instinctively shoots to his feet, glaring around the clearing; he doesn’t actually see anything, but at least it gets Dream to laugh wheezily. It’s probably true, knowing he does about Dream and his paranoia and need to be at least five steps ahead of everyone else. Fundy’s lucky he didn’t step on a landmine tripping his way to Dream’s door.

“You’re fine.” Dream pats the dirt at his side clumsily, and Fundy, taking the unspoken invitation, collapses beside him gratefully. The reverb of the explosion finally wanes, and the gloomy pre-dawn settles quiet around them save the wind in the leaves and footsteps of wild animals.

The amicable silence gives Fundy room to see the flash of light behind his eyelids. The determined snarl on Dream’s face, his hair haloing his face, the deliberate way he reached out toward the golem, as though he knew there was a landmine there more than he was trying to shield Fundy. The shaking, the sighing, the ominous shudder in his lungs. 

Fundy hazards a peek at Dream, whose breathing is starting to loosen into a light snore. He looks completely at ease, his hands clasped in his lap, a far cry from the honed, calculating person that had stood there just minutes before. 

For a moment - just a single, fleeting moment - Fundy wonders.

(He lets it go almost in the same moment. He doesn’t care. He loves his friend; it doesn’t matter.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unconventional relationships - i.e. queerplatonic relationships, marrying friends in a platonic way - is a huge favorite of mine, because honestly, fuck gender roles, fuck societal conventions of love and friendship. all qpps and platonic life partners out there, fuck it up, you're doing amazing, y’all are a big mood.


	2. purpled (uh oh social interaction)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahaha being a teenager is ✨awkward✨ and purpled thinks dream is cool but also doesn’t know him that well ✨✨ (perhaps written from personal experience hh)

Purpled is in Dream’s world mostly by coincidence. A friendly conversation here, a victorious Bedwars there, and boom, he’s in someone’s good graces and gets invited to a relatively untouched world and told, kindly, to “build your heart out.”

Purpled isn’t about to say no to that.

There’s something elating about creation, and not in the “I-have-a-messiah-complex” way. Purpled’s just someone who genuinely prefers to keep out of conflict, who’d rather live quietly in his UFO with DogChamp and maybe grow a garden at some point than go careening into fights willy-nilly like some people who shall not be named so love to do. 

No shade to them, of course. It’s just not Purpled’s preferred lifestyle. 

So it’s a bit of a surprise when Dream drops by for a quick visit one day. Purpled doesn’t know the world owner well enough for this kind of social call, and Purpled fully admits he spent the three minutes it takes for someone to beam up to his humble abode panicking and rearranging the contents of his chests like a madman because he literally has no idea what to do. He’s standing awkwardly by the entrance hatch when Dream’s head pops up, clad in an iron helmet and his signature mask. Dream grins and pulls himself out and shakes his head like a dog.

“Hey, Purpled, how’s it going?” he asks, wringing his hair out. 

Purpled opts to ignore the fact that his guest is getting water all over the floor and replies casually, “Not much, how about you?” then silently bemoans his weak answer.

Dream, thank god, either doesn’t notice Purpled’s embarrassment or moves past it tactfully. “I’m doing a manhunt,” he informs Purpled cheerfully, and Purpled nods absentmindedly, watching Dream tip water out of his boots before his brain short-circuits.

“A manhunt,” he repeats slowly. 

“Yeah, you know. Me getting to the End and killing an Ender Dragon as fast as I can while a couple of my friends try to kill me, the like.” Dream waves his hand dismissively, like the words that just came out of his mouth aren’t objectively terrifying. “Normally we do it on small blank servers that a minor god I know sets up for us because they like me, but we thought it’d be fun to do it here for once. They definitely won’t expect me to to take shelter with someone.”

Now that Dream’s explained, Purpled notices how kitted-out Dream is; not to his usual degree, but to a point where it’s clear Dream’s started with nothing and may also be a fugitive. Full iron, a diamond axe strapped to his back, an iron sword through one of his belt loops, a crossbow through another. His shield is propped beside him, and the pouches on his belt emit that telltale humming chord that indicates magic. 

“Wow, you’re doing great,” says Purpled without thinking. Dream chuckles as he flaps his gloves to dry them off. 

“Yeah, it’s going pretty well,” he admits. “Normally it’s a whole process, trying to get them off my tail at the beginning then finding reliable lava sources, finding iron, finding diamonds if I’m lucky and whatnot. The only rules this time were that I couldn’t take existing resources from myself and other people, but we never said anything about Nether portals, so.” He shrugs, impish. “It’s all about how you use them, you know?”

Purpled nods, somewhat awed. It’s the first time he and Dream have held a proper conversation like this, face-to-face and containing actual substance, not just their usual nodded greetings when passing each other by and maybe a genial “Nice weather, yeah?” He’s gleaned more about Dream’s personality in the last ten minutes than he has in the past three weeks, and Purpled finds himself liking Dream, his easygoing nature, his dry humor, the hint of genius in him. 

“But that’s enough about that,” Dream says, cutting off Purpled’s musings. He pulls out a steak, offers one to Purpled and tucks it away when Purpled shakes his head, and tucks his chin in his hand as he begins to eat it. He gestures to the UFO enclosing them and says, “This is super cool. Tell me how you did it?”

So Purpled, feeling more at ease by the minute, outlines his house plans. He stumbles a couple times when he gets particularly excited about picking out the color scheme and his redstone configuration, but Dream is patient, attentive, asks questions at the right times and nearly dies laughing when Purpled recounts with disgust the several instances of creepers blowing up his “beam-me-up-Scotty” setup. It occurs to Purpled as he describes the several complications he’d experienced building so high up in the sky that it’s the first time since he’s been on this world that he’s talked lightheartedly like this, about his interests, things he’s passionate about. Dream’s fully engaged, and you’d think he’d be above as petty a conversation as this one, what with him being the owner of the world, but he’s completely human, and Purpled feels something warm, something kind, blooming in his chest.

The tranquility is busted by Bad’s nigh-hysterical screech of _“Dream! We know you’re there, get down here and face us!”_

Purpled darts to the green-tinted glass to peer down and sure enough, Bad, Antfrost, Sapnap, and George are clustered around the base of the elevator. George has no armor and Antfrost seems to be using a stone hoe rather than any kind of actual weapon, but the looks of despair and rage on their faces are completely identical. When Sapnap meets Purpled’s gaze he bares his teeth and waves his bow threateningly, which, okay, frightening _and_ feral, got it.

“Oh, they’re, like, rabid. Awesome,” says Dream conversationally, joining Purpled at the hatch; he and Purpled clearly have different definitions of “awesome”. He’s gearing up again now, pulling his boots back on and tugging his hood over his helmet. He tilts his head briefly to Purpled and Purpled knows even without seeing it that Dream winked at him. “Time to head out. You mind if I leave through a window?”

It’s concern that prompts Purpled to say, “If you’ve got water on you, sure,” and Dream laughs but flashes a water bucket at Purpled anyway for his peace of mind. 

Purpled glances back down at the hatch and is completely unprepared to see Antfrost and Bad heading up, with Bad leading, both of them discussing something seriously. From the way Antfrost gestures a couple times, Purpled guesses they’re contemplating how to kill Dream. When he looks up to warn his guest, he realizes Dream has already kicked through one of the windows facing toward the wilderness and is waving goodbye. Purpled waves back, too taken aback by the turn of events to really articulate a farewell, but Dream just salutes him with a quirk to his mouth and leaps with a whoop out of the hole in the UFO just as Bad pops up out of the hatch.

“Purpled!” he wails by way of greeting, staggering out of the hatch, seemingly pushed by Antfrost. “We trusted you!”

“Aw fuck,” says Antfrost when he spots the hole.

“Language!”

Purpled sticks his tongue out at both of them, feeling somehow juvenile, giddy, like a kid skipping school for his role in Dream’s escape. He grabs onto one of the grooves in the wall for security and leans out just in time to see Dream scoop up his water, spin on his heel, flash a peace sign at George and Sapnap, and throw something garish red at their feet.

It’s TNT.

Something along the lines of “Oh, Dream, you _asshole,”_ dances through Purpled’s brain, and he almost misses it when Dream pivots to wave at the hunters - no, the hunters have scrambled back so won’t see him, he’s not waving at them, why is he gesturing at the elevator - and the TNT detonates with a highly distracting and highly destructive _boom_ , punctuated by Sapnap’s shriek of pain and the _pop_ of someone dying and respawning elsewhere. Purpled squints through the cloud of debris, trying to analyze the damage done and already mentally going through his redstone stores, how much he needs and where he’ll patch - but when the dust clears, Purpled finds himself gaping.

The elevator is untouched. The ground around it is demolished, sure, but the glass encasing the elevator, as well as the actual machinery that makes it work buried beneath the ground, are all spotless. 

“What,” he says.

Antfrost pops his head out from behind Purpled, whistles. “Wow, that’s one hell of a build you got there,” he tells Purpled admiringly. “After we’re done murdering Dream, can you tell me how you did it?”

“Sure,” says Purpled distractedly, eyes still fixed on the way the crater left by the TNT wraps around his UFO as though shielded. His mind flickers back, unbidden, to the way Dream had gestured at the elevator. The brief spasm of concentration in his face.

The next week, just to be sure, Purpled uses the UFO for target practice using Fire Aspect arrows. They clatter away uselessly upon impact. 

After, on a whim, Purpled drops by Dream’s base and leaves a few netherite ingots on his scuffed doorstep. Leaves a note with them, scrawled, “Stop by again whenever :) but not when you’re being chased by four bloodthirsty men.”

When Dream pokes his head out of the entrance hatch the next day, the smile that rises to Purpled’s face is quick and easy and doesn’t fade at all.


	3. sapnap (dust to dust)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: temporary character death, mild body horror (dramatized necrosis).

Sapnap staggers backward as the wither skeleton clatters into a useless pile of bones, dropping his shield and his sword as he stumbles til his back hits the opposite wall and he slumps, trying not to panic, trying not to cry. He averts his gaze but can feel the pins-and-needles pricking that creeps over his left arm. He doesn’t need to look to know that black patches are blooming on his skin. 

Withering is the worst way to go. 

Objectively, this fucking sucks. It was stupid of Sapnap to duck into the fortress with only iron leggings and a helmet, an iron sword and half-used shield. He didn’t even bring a flask of milk with him - rookie mistake - and now he’s going to crumble into a pile of black dust surrounded by unforgiving nether bricks and soul sand and it’s going to hurt until the necrosis reaches his brain or his heart. _Fuck_. 

Sapnap has always thought that dying slowly and painfully is the worst. Yeah, he’s a little trigger-happy whenever someone puts a flint and steel into his hand, but he’s _careful_ , knows fire better than most other people, can calculate spread and damage based on environmental factors just as quickly as Dream can pinpoint and decide between four different emergency exits in any given situation. He’s never died because of fire, even if it’s mostly because his friends keep buckets of water on themselves at all times. Some of it is about efficiency: better to die quickly and respawn quickly than drag out something inevitable unnecessarily. The quieter part of Sapnap reminds him that it’s okay to be afraid of suffering until the end, with no one to comfort him. Just because he always comes back doesn’t mean the process of death is any less daunting. 

Sapnap can’t help himself, glances down at his arms, tries to bite down on his sob and fails; the black has spread properly now, covering his hands and slowly but surely climbing up past his elbows. He won’t be able to hold anything like that, the needle-pricks of pain becoming harder and harder to ignore. The withering is too close to his heart, too. There’s no coming back from this. 

The sound of someone running toward him is what brings Sapnap back to himself, the fugue lifting somewhat and bringing the pain back in crystal clarity as he looks up and finds himself staring down Dream in full netherite. 

Dream emits an incomprehensible, distraught noise and sprints to his side, casting off his helmet and chestplate and patting his pockets down as he crouches. Sapnap dimly hears him swear under his breath as he comes up empty; he probably wasn’t expecting to need potions with a time constraint on him, and as is, Sapnap won’t last long enough for Dream to return to the Overworld and bring back anything that will help. Dream comes to this conclusion when Sapnap does and he swears in earnest now, spitting berating curses at himself as he reaches out and places his gloved hand on Sapnap’s cooling cheek, anguish in the tremble of his mouth.

“Sapnap,” he says helplessly, when Sapnap tenses up even as weak as he is. “Sapnap, oh, bud...”

Before meeting Dream, Sapnap never knew a single person who took death that hard. Respawn is a given and everyone knows it; it’s part of humanity, a gift from the old gods, for their little people who always want to build, explore, flourish, but are too fragile to last long with that hunger in them. But the first time Sapnap died in front of Dream, Dream locked himself into his bunker and hadn’t left for days. He acted fine and dandy when he emerged from his hermit cave, but Sapnap took that memory and carved it into his mind and always, always tried his best not to force Dream to sit through anyone dying, even during manhunts, when Dream killed far more readily than at any other time. Who knows? Maybe there was trauma there, steeped into him, and Sapnap sure as hell wasn’t going to be the person who rubbed salt into his best friend’s wounds. 

This, though... there’s really nothing Sapnap can do, not without milk or a healing potion. He can’t feel his fingertips anymore, doesn’t want to look because he knows they’re crumbling away, and his arms are burning up cold. 

“This... fucking sucks,” he tells Dream, hoping to make light of the situation just a little. Dream looks at him like his heart is breaking and Sapnap cringes in apology. 

“Don’t,” Dream whispers, but his touch is gentle when he maneuvers Sapnap from the wall so that he’s lying down, his head in Dream’s lap. A wordless gratitude rises to Sapnap’s lips, and he wants to thank Dream for not letting him see the withering, for not letting him see how close he is to dying, but his throat burns and he can’t form the sentence.

Dream’s fingers ghost over Sapnap’s face as he leans over him, and even though his hands shake his voice is nothing but steady as he murmurs, “Shh...” and Sapnap, losing feeling in his legs, frostbite-pain edging up his torso, feeling pressure behind his eyes that he won’t let resolve into tears, does. 

They sit like that for what feels like a small eternity, the fortress wrapped in looming silence save the occasional crackle of fire. Once or twice Sapnap fancies he hears the hollow clack of wither skeleton bones, but Dream doesn’t give any indication of alarm, so Sapnap hopes it’s just the withering reaching his auditory system. Dream never moves, except to smooth his hand over Sapnap’s hair. Once Sapnap begins to feel that crawling rot in his lungs and his breath dissolves into faint, rattling wheezes and black inches into his peripherals so that all he can see is the white of Dream’s mask, his mouth, his hair curled into his face, Dream starts to hum. 

There’s no particular melody, or at least not one that’s familiar to Sapnap. It’s just a tremulous little slide of notes, dancing one by one into the brimstone air, haunting, hurting, something to lull him to sleep. The pain is everywhere now, and Sapnap can’t think or breathe for how oppressive it is, feeling like his skin is squeezing into his bones, like he’s been set on a bed of needles, and he knows there must be tears on his face because Dream’s hand, warm where everything else is icy cold, is brushing something away from his face. 

In the last seconds of consciousness, Sapnap feels lips on his forehead, the only part of him that isn’t freezing, like an anchor point. In the last seconds of consciousness, as that last sliver of heat slips away, it stops hurting (even though normally it hurts until it ends, even though sometimes Sapnap awakens with the pain still in his bones, even though withering follows you to the grave).

In the last seconds of consciousness, not quite dead but not quite hurting, Sapnap thinks he hears a faint rattle in Dream’s lungs.

He respawns in his house. Bolts upright with a gasp of relief that he can move all his limbs, feel his extremities; he turns his hands over to check for the telltale black of the withering effect but finds nothing. He allows himself a second to breathe, to reflect, to gather himself and come back to life. Shaking off the grimness with a practiced ease, he grins, pulls on a chestplate, grabs a flask of milk and a sword, and heads out to Dream’s bunker, looking to cheer him up. 

When he gets there, though, and knocks on the door, there’s no response. The torches are out, the lanterns within unlit, and when Sapnap peers through the window on the door, the base is dark. Thinking Dream might still be in the Nether, he waits out front all night, yawning and fighting off what few mobs hang around Dream’s corner of the forest, but the owner of the house never shows. Sapnap holds out til daybreak the next morning, but when Dream doesn’t appear even then, he lets it go as a lost cause. For a moment he puts his hand to the door, bites his lip. Closes his eyes and hopes that maybe somewhere Dream will hear him when he thinks _Sorry sorry sorry, for making you hold me til I died, for forcing you to watch my heart stop_ , and walks away with his sword slung over his shoulder, wondering if he’ll see his best friend tomorrow. 

Deep within the bunker, somebody sobs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm really chugging these chapters out, aren't i? i have a lot of thoughts about this fic that i want to put down, so they're getting written quite quickly. if we're lucky, i think i can get this fic done before the end of the year ^^ 
> 
> i've also got to change the tags for the fic now too, i forgot that it's minecraft and i have to tag respawning.


	4. ponk (beaches dry of sugarcane)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title is a line from cavetown’s lemon boy. i’m the pinnacle of wit, i know.

Ponk is chilling amongst the burning branches of his humble abode when Dream clambers up, all lanky limbs, deftly avoiding the tongues of flame. 

“Hello, Spiderman,” Ponk says, with all the ironic cheer of a store clerk during Black Friday.

“Hello yourself.” Dream punches his arm lightly and settles beside Ponk, throwing off his hood and fanning himself with his hand. “Whew, is it hot in here, or is it just me?”

Ponk snorts. “It’s my natural glow,” he retorts. Dream chuckles as he shakes out his hair and ties it into a tail. Ponk supposes it _is_ hot, given that they’re sitting in a tree on fire, but it’s also Ponk’s first home in Dream’s world, so, yes, he’s just a tiny bit torn up about it. He gets to sit in a burning tree if he wants to, who’s gonna stop him?

“This is more of a Sapnap thing, I think,” Dream says conversationally, ducking a little when a charred branch topples between them to the ground something like forty blocks below. Ponk winces when it bursts into splinters in the grass. “The whole fire aesthetic. You’re edging into his territory a little bit here.”

Ponk grimaces. “It’s my first house in your world, Dream, I think I’m allowed to be a little sentimental about it,” he says. It comes out a shade more sincere than he’d intended, and he coughs into his elbow to avoid Dream’s gaze when the latter shoots a searching look at him. 

“...Did George put you up to this?” Ponk asks finally, running his hand over the grooves of the branch they’re sitting on. 

“No,” Dream says immediately. He’s so earnest Ponk has to believe him. “Did he set your tree on fire?”

Ponk offers Dream a smile, sheepish. “I may have griefed his house first,” he admits, and Dream muffles a laugh into his hand. Ponk’s never been the type to deflect when he’s done something wrong. He concedes that George’s little arson trip may not be entirely unfounded. All the same, Ponk was rather emotionally invested in his lemon tree, so.

“Pretty clean revenge plot,” muses Dream, breaking Ponk out of his morose train of thought. He’s peering up through the furls of red wreathing around the branches like garish autumn leaves, his chin cupped in his hand. “Relatively equal value and everything. That’s tough, Ponk.”

Ponk sighs and drops his head against the trunk at that, watching the summer yellow lemons disintegrate into ribbons of ash, glum. Dream makes it a rule of thumb to keep a degree of order in his world; griefing and stealing is let by for the most part if a crime of the same caliber is committed against the offender (“This is some fuckin’... Hammurabi’s Code shit,” Sapnap had remarked following Dream’s decree, whereupon Dream pounced on him and they wrestled for a solid forty seconds while Alyssa, Bad, and Ponk pretended not to notice). A small part of Ponk had hoped, maybe childishly, that his tree had been somehow worth more, but - well. Technically speaking, they’re both just homes. Even if George had pretty thoroughly destroyed Ponk’s house, Ponk had trashed his.

“Well,” he replies as lightly as he can, dodging another burning branch as it tumbles to the earth, “this kind of sucks.”

Dream pats Ponk’s shoulder sympathetically. “Yeah, it does,” he says, and the touch of regret in his voice makes Ponk glance up at him. Ponk’s never seen his friend’s face - none of them have, save Sapnap, who’s known Dream the longest - but they’ve all learned, out of respect for Dream, to read his expressions regardless of the mask, and the slant of Dream’s mouth tells Ponk that he’s beating himself up over something stupid.

“Don’t be dumb,” he tells Dream, not unkindly. Dream squawks, and despite everything, Ponk can’t not laugh at him. “Dude, it’s fine! I have another lemon tree and everything, you know? Like, yeah, it sucks because this was the first one, but it’s - ” Ponk holds out his hands, gestures toward the burning mess around them, and believes himself when he says, “it’s not the end of the world.”

Dream’s face softens and he looks down thoughtfully at the tree as the bark curls off the branch they’re sat on. Ponk, for his part, reminisces of the first day he arrived, amidst the whoops of Sapnap and George and Sam, Callahan signing something excitedly as Alyssa and Bad watched intently; they’d all been graced with Dream’s invitation, scrawled, “alright, heathens, go forth, do your thing! this world is basically endless.” The lemon tree was a labor of love, the second one even more so, but there was a wonder packed into the first one, a story from before others began to show up and make friends, the slow simmering feeling of serenity and the luxury of an infinite space to explore, wanderlust satisfied. Ponk passes his hand over the trunk of the lemon tree with finality, feeling silly but thanking it for the memories, thanking it for the shelter, thanking it for the home. When he opens his eyes again, Dream has slipped away, a lime-green beacon trotting off into the evening, probably to leave Ponk to his little ritual (and some kind of citrus-related quip might be appropriate here, but Ponk comes up blank). Ponk looks up at the foliage ablaze over his head, down at the tangle of roots stretching every which way, the bright lemons alight scarlet, and sighs, scratches his head, and clambers down to start packing up.

He leaves the first tree little more than a smoldering ruin, dragging a full pack with him to the second. Trying to save a burning forest is a fool’s errand, and Ponk’s getting over it, coming down from the high of some kind of unnameable, inexplicable grief over something transient. He’d made the second tree for a reason, after all. Still, he’s probably going to steer clear of George for a few days; he can’t think of his friend right now without seeing lemons giving off smoke. 

Ponk’s not paying attention when he goes down the wooden path to his tree, mind caught somewhere in flames and homes and what you make of them. It’s only when he stops to enter the tree that he frowns, squints up, and nearly has a heart attack. 

The thing’s huge, bigger than it was just a week ago when he last checked it. The ash-brown trunk is larger, the bark more solid, and when Ponk glances down as his boot scuffs something the root system has upturned the earth by its base, the ground loamy beneath his feet, curlicued like horns all around him. The night has deepened, so it’s hard to properly tell, but Ponk’s sure when he screws up his eyes again at the emerald green over his head that the leaves are lusher, wider, fanned out over low-hanging, sun-golden lemons shining dully in the dark. 

Ponk’s pack slides off his shoulder; he barely notices, he’s so floored. 

“What the heck,” he whispers to no one in particular.

Later, he’ll realize the ground was fresh-turned, the dirt turned inside out recently. He’ll realize he’d dropped by his tree just yesterday, that it wasn’t nearly so glorious as it is now then. He’ll realize that Dream was headed off in the direction of his tree when he left. 

And he’ll discard the niggling theory making itself at home at the back of his head, because he knows better than to pry with Dream, who gets cagey about things most of the others don’t, but when Dream engages in friendly mayhem with the new kid, when Dream passes those discs around amongst his “allies” like a child playing war games, smile bright, mischievous, effervescent - 

Ponk takes his side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i struggle to write ponk’s personality, and i think it kind of shows in this chapter; it’s part of why this chapter is a smidgeon shorter than the others. nonetheless, i hope you all enjoyed ^^


	5. sam (oh god oh fuck)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> am i emotionally burnt out because unus annus, mcc 12, and class notes were all over this weekend? perhaps. did writing this chapter help? hell yeah

Redstone mining is a process. The stuff’s surprisingly delicate, and notoriously finicky; there’s a reason few people branch out into redstone work. It leans too far into the technical side of things for many who’d rather invest their time and energy into activities that reap more socially fulfilling rewards. Just gathering it is a task requiring fortitude, dedication, and a solid amount of time on your hands, alongside a passion for redstone work. People rarely have all four. 

Luckily for Sam, he’s patient, dedicated, a certified homebody and thus unaccosted by time-consuming social obligations, and is completely nuts about redstone.

Sam sifts through the redstone he’s mined already with his fingers close together, feeling his way through his first batch. Aside from the occasional lump of rock still attached, the powder’s good to go, so Sam tucks it away into the chest he’s set up, turns around, and ventures back into the tunnel he came from. 

“Do you think I could rig something up with redstone someday in a manhunt?” asks Dream, who’s lying faceup on one of the mined-out pockets Sam’s left behind, his hands folded on his stomach, serene. “Probably won’t happen, it’s too hard to come by and too time-consuming to put together, but, like, imagine what I could do.” He’s got that dreamy tone to his voice that tells Sam he’s in the zone, lost in that space he drifts off to when he cooks up insane survival schemes that get more and more out-there with every manhunt he puts on. 

“I can imagine what you could do, and it’s horrifying,” Sam tells him primly, and returns to his mining, torch aloft, as Dream snorts. It’s not that Sam doesn’t appreciate and respect Dream’s prowess; hell, everyone in this world knows Dream’s a monster when it comes to strategy, application, precision. It’s just that some manhunts, Dream comes back limping, or bleeding profusely, or being carried, and it’s not often the hunters, who seemingly respawn and have it over with; Dream rarely fails, and it shows in how sometimes he comes home and there are scars on his skin that weren’t there before. Sam weighs another chunk of redstone in his hand as he considers. Dream always bounces back with practiced ease, but there’s a tiny shard of Sam that’s always concerned for his friend, always paranoid one day Dream won’t recover so easily. 

Maybe Sam’s overthinking it, though. He’s never been a combat-oriented member of the server, preferring to stick to building, and so he’s never been a firsthand witness to Dream fighting tooth and nail, not the way people like George and Sapnap, his best friends and manhunt fixtures, nor those like Fundy and Punz, Minecraft Championship staples, are. 

Dream waves a hand in the air, gesturing vaguely. “Another TNT minecart trick, more elaborate this time,” he murmurs contemplatively, not even noticing Sam when he swoops by to deposit more redstone into the chest. “TNT’s the best thing I could use in a given situation that I could work redstone with... desert temples? It’s either that or farming creepers, which would be stupid, and give away my position...” His voice grows faint as Sam bolts into the tunnel again. He’s hit upon a cave system worming its way through a mineshaft, which usually lead deeper down if anything, and he’s peering through the one-by-one hole with apprehension. 

“Dream, quit talking shop and come be my bodyguard for a bit?” he calls, pitching his voice to carry through the tunnel. He hears a clatter as Dream rolls off the rock he’d made himself comfortable on, then brisk footsteps approaching. Without looking, Sam hands Dream a stack of torches and jumps into the cave. 

It’s pitch-dark, which is expected. Sam lifts his torch tentatively, peering into the gloom. Dream lands lightly behind him and asks, “See anything?”

Sam inches into the mineshaft, placing a torch off to the side and shifting to pull his pickaxe from his belt. It’s rare, but the chance for mined redstone that requires little handling is too good to pass up. “Not yet. Let’s go deeper.”

“That’s what you love to hear.”

“Dude.” Sam barks out a surprised laugh, shoves Dream with his shoulder as Dream cackles and strides past him. The sound makes Sam’s shoulders loosen slightly; it’s good to hear the world owner laugh. He’s always been a lighthearted person, but recently - after Sapnap died in the Nether - Dream’s been a little more downcast, a little more quiet. Sam asked him to come with when he went mining partly to get Dream out of his own head. Sam’s one of the first on the server, an old friend of Dream’s; he knows, just like Sapnap, how Dream takes deaths that aren’t his own. 

“Oh, watch your head - skeleton,” says Dream, voice suddenly sharp, and Sam ducks away obligingly as Dream darts past him and dispatches said skeleton with ease. 

“Thanks.”

“No prob.” Dream tucks his axe into his belt again, leaves his hand loosely on its handle as they venture in further. Sam loots the first chest they stumble upon efficiently - a few different types of rails, a golden apple, and a handful of pumpkin seeds looking like they’ve seen better days - and they move on with little comment. 

“Anyway, you were saying about the manhunt redstone ideas...?” prompts Sam as they rummage through another chest (some lapis, more rails, a lump of coal, and a small heap of redstone). “I can’t help you on the combat front, but traps... I’m your guy.”

Dream brightens, takes on that dreamy look again. “Oh, _hell_ yeah. So, I know it’s not time-efficient, but just _imagine_...”

They go on like that for what must be a solid half-hour, Dream brainstorming on the spot and Sam vetoing or supplementing ideas with his own extensive knowledge. He can’t help the fondness that wells up in his chest as they trot through the derelict tunnels; Dream’s brilliant in a different way than Sam is, and Sam hadn’t realized until now that he’s missed this: the mutual scaffolding, the catching-up. The mining excursion is just as good for Sam as it is for Dream. 

They halt at a four-way intersection, given pause by the gloom up ahead. The right hall leads to an immediate dead end, and the left is a tunnel they’ve already gone through and looped around earlier. If he squints, Sam can just barely make out the dull gleam of the clasp of a chest beyond the ramshackle row of fences, but he also thinks he may or may not see something moving back there. Hoping for a better view, he holds his torch as far out as he can into the hall without actually entering it, but it’s like there’s a pall over it. Sam finds himself grimacing as he checks his packs; he’s looted an okay amount of redstone but nowhere near the amount he’d projected before heading out in the morning. He worries his lip between his teeth as he weighs the pros and cons; he really does want to check the chest before leaving the mineshaft.

Finally, he declares with bravado he doesn’t really feel, “Okay, I’m going in,” hefting his pickaxe over his shoulder. 

Dream doesn’t look too worried - “Cool,” - but he does stick closer to Sam’s heels as they set off. 

It’s darker than Sam expected. The torches do little to ward off the shadows, and even with it held out before him Sam can barely see two blocks in either direction. His feet catch on something more than once, but when he shines his torch down by his feet there’s nothing but old cobwebs. 

“Sam, there’s the chest,” says Dream suddenly from a little ways behind, cutting through the oppressive silence. Sam follows where his finger’s pointing and feels his nerves settle, excitement take their place: it is indeed a chest, right in front of them. Sam would have tripped over it.

“Awesome,” he says, not even bothering to hide his relief. He affixes the torch he’s holding to the wall and is shimmying the rusty clasp open when there’s a familiar low, skittering sound that echoes around them that makes Sam’s blood freeze. 

His eyes shoot up, instinct more than habit. He wishes he hadn’t looked. 

Two spawners smolder quietly just a block or so off from the chest, and spindly banded legs emerge from the cages periodically, dark blue bodies following. Icy-cold alarm fills Sam’s chest; he pulls his hand away from the chest as slowly as he possibly can, knowing movement, rather than sound, is what alerts cave spiders. 

His gaze flickers back to check on Dream, and he realizes two very important things almost simultaneously. 

One, Dream was further behind than Sam initially thought - give or take four blocks - so he hasn’t noticed the double spawner. 

Two, the torchlight is a dead giveaway; the spiders can see that Sam is there. 

The third thing that occurs to Sam is a succinct _Oh, shit!_ before the spiders burst forth from the dark, emitting high, sibilant noises as they communicate to one another, clattering over the cages and the chest and the cobblestone beneath their legs. 

“Dream,” Sam cries, rearing back, “run for it!”

And then, as a big fuck-you from the universe to him, his foot catches on an uneven plank of wood and he tumbles flat onto his back. 

There’s a ringing in Sam’s ears - he’s not sure if it’s a sign of a concussion or the gleeful hisses of the cave spiders - he can distantly, like the lap of a wave against a cliff, hear Dream yell wordlessly - his last nonsensical thought before the legs converge on him is _I’m sorry to make you watch another friend die, Dream_ \- 

There’s only a faint prick of a spider leg on his chest before there’s an abrupt, swelling silence. 

Sam had screwed his eyes shut, and his shoulders are hiked up to his ears, arms clutched in close in a futile attempt to prevent any of the spiders getting to his vital organs. He gingerly opens an eye now, unnerved by the absence of toxins coursing through his veins and legs decapitating him, and scrambles to a sitting position, gaping. 

Because there are no spiders to be seen anywhere. The hall seems brighter without the writhing dark of the hostile mob, and the only thing Sam can see for blocks ahead is the extensive stretch of cobwebs down the hall, some spun out near the mouth of the tunnel. 

“Oh my god,” he says weakly, and turns to Dream, and is wholly unprepared for Dream to sink to his knees with a quiet little shudder. 

“Oh my god,” he says again, this time faster, this time more frightened; he tries to get some of his shaking under control as he teeters unsteadily to Dream’s side and grips Dream’s sleeve and pulls him over slightly to get a good look at his pallor. The only logical explanation Sam can reach is that Dream somehow slaughtered the spiders in one go, which Sam doesn’t exactly put past him, but if he did that, the likelihood of bites is high, and unlike surface spiders, cave spiders are _venomous_.

He pats down Dream’s torso clumsily, turns both hands in his own, feeling for puncture marks, all the while mumbling incomprehensibly, “Dream, Dream, Dream,” because the bravado he’d equipped has all but deserted him now and the only thing he feels is cold panic all the way down to his toes. Dying by venom is the worst way to go, and he doesn’t want Dream to die alone, because Sam’s never been there when Dream has died but if Dream takes others’ respawns so badly how does he take - 

“Sam,” mumbles Dream, and Sam’s heart nearly stops for the third time in the last five minutes. 

“Dream,” he responds frantically, as Dream shifts away from the wall entirely to lean on Sam. He babbles something, but Dream shushes him and in his own trembling hands clutches Sam’s with a steadiness that shakes Sam more than anything else about Dream’s less-than-optimal appearance. 

Dream’s breath leaves him in a long, tremulous sigh. “Did any get you?” he asks, the edges of his voice dulled by exhaustion, and Sam has to pause and think before he realizes Dream is asking if any of the spiders got Sam. 

“N-no,” he manages, and Dream nods jerkily in acknowledgement. He looks so frazzled that Sam can’t help himself asking, “Are you - ”

“Fine,” Dream says shortly, cutting Sam off. He reaches past him and passes his hand over the spawner closer to them. His mouth tugs into a snarl as he rifles through his pockets, pulls out a torch, and plants it squarely onto the cage with a vigor he hadn’t had just moments ago. He glares at it even as he sags, spitting, “Fucking nuisance.”

Sam just watches him, eyes wide. 

Eventually, they will gather themselves enough to traipse back to the main tunnel Sam had dug out. Sam will pack his redstone into a dry container and Dream will pass him his other minerals from the chest. They will squint into the glare of the afternoon sun, set adrift thoughts of cobwebs and cave spiders, and part ways for the day with cheery, if tired, goodbyes. 

For now, though, Sam tilts his head back into the mineshaft wall, digs the heels of his hands into his eyes, and thinks about the split-second of furnace-fire fury that blistered in Dream’s face before Sam was swarmed by spiders. Thinks about how Dream’s hand was nowhere near his axe as he stepped forward, shoulders squared, eyes bright and hard under his mask. Thinks about debts unpaid, and how Sapnap must have felt. 

Thinks, with a pinprick of fondness that warms his chest, about the schematics for a simple TNT trap that he will leave on Dream’s doorstep tomorrow, something that will tell Dream everything he cannot say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> local man has three consecutive heart attacks while childhood friend breaks a few laws of the universe
> 
> this chapter was fun to write! sam’s brilliant, and i liked the dynamic of two geniuses in different crafts. it does need to be said that none of these chapters so far are in any particular chronological order, so while sam’s chapter is explicitly set after sapnap’s, ponk’s chapter is set timeline-wise way before. anyway, hope yall enjoyed ^^


	6. punz (lines drawn)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: mild gore, implied panic attack.
> 
> fun things i learned whilst writing this chapter: manslaughter and murder are different things by legal definition
> 
> fun things that happened whilst writing this chapter: the final streams of l’manberg arc i can’t i can’t i’m sobbing i’m in hysterics i am just in shambles i

The first thing you should know about Punz: he is not above accepting bribes. It’s a personal weakness of his; whether or not he ends up doing what he was instructed to do after the items of value exchanged hands is, of course, his prerogative, but Punz generally finishes his tasks with little complaint. It’s good sportsmanship, and besides, some of the things the others in Dream’s world ask him to do are really, really funny. 

Like this one. 

“Punz, _leave me alone,”_ shrieks Dream, leaping from tree to tree like the complete maniac he is. Punz has already fallen out of the branches twice trying to go for a hit and failing miserably due to that all-powerful force known as gravity. However, what he lacks in dexterity he makes up for with power; the few swipes he’s gotten in have slowed Dream down at least a little bit. 

“Not a chance,” he crows back, dropping down from the tree he was in and deciding to go it on foot rather than struggle in the treetops, which is decidedly more Dream’s playing field. Hey, Punz has spectated a few manhunts, has crossed swords with Dream in Minecraft Championships; he knows roughly Dream’s combat style even if he can’t predict Dream’s movements. 

He manages to tag Dream to the nearby river, where the line of trees ends, and he laughs when he hears Dream curse swiftly under his breath and dive into the water without hesitation. “Getting tired, Dream?” he asks mockingly as Dream’s head bobs up in the water, as he clears the river in just a few broad strokes. 

“Shut the hell your mouth,” Dream hollers back, burying both hands in his hair and shaking the water out of it as Punz crosses the river by placing his own stepping-stones. “What, you got a hit on me or something?”

Punz scans Dream briefly as he reaches the opposite bank, trying to recall the tips Dream himself had offered up in unguarded moments over the years. His feet are planted wide, weight distributed evenly, so he’s not about to bolt. He’s unarmed and free of armor save a diamond axe and shield, nowhere near his usual level of prep. His gaze remains trained evenly on Punz, as expected; you don’t get to Dream’s level of prowess by being careless. 

“Maybe,” Punz admits in response to Dream’s question, thinking with light sheepishness back to Sapnap cheerfully pressing five diamonds into his hand in passing and telling him to “Fuck up Dream for me, bro!” Most of the requests he gets as the self-appointed paid muscle of the server do end up being either related to griefing or first-degree manslaughter, so this isn’t a first, but it _is_ the first hit on Dream that someone’s ordered thus far (which is surprising; Punz figured Tommy, the chaos gremlin of a newcomer, would have attempted one first), so Punz is understandably a little apprehensive. 

Dream readjusts his weight minutely and Punz’s attention immediately snaps back to him. He’s no combat god, but he knows enough to keep up with big-leaguers like TapL, and it’s that instinct that keeps him from getting his nose broken when Dream pounces, shoulder first, leaning in with his shield as he rushes him. 

Punz rears back with a yelp, almost loses his balance but manages to get his feet under him at the last second, digs the bottom of his own shield into the dirt to keep him stable and thrusts with his sword blindly. Dream twists deftly out of the way with a cut-off grunt of annoyance and lands on all fours, crouched not unlike an ocelot a few blocks away as Punz gets to his feet and brings up his blade. 

Dream sinks back onto his haunches, not unguarded but not fully engaged, either. “You’re good,” he says appreciatively, rolling his shoulders back, and laughs when Punz preens at the compliment. “Have you been practicing?”

Punz bares his teeth into a grin as he replies brusquely, “Of course I have,” diving at Dream as he speaks in order to try for the element of surprise. It doesn’t faze Dream - of course it doesn’t - but Punz does manage to get a solid cut on Dream’s right upper arm before Dream rams his shield up into Punz’s chest, knocking the air out of him. He wheezes and staggers back, deflecting Dream’s axe with his sword. 

They pause once more to gauge one another. Punz is winded, and he breathes as slowly and deeply as he can as he eyes Dream, who’s not nearly as breathless but who’s also sporting more minor injuries than Punz is. As they circle each other on the riverbank, Dream swiftly unravels the bandage he keeps encircling his left arm and wraps his right bicep. 

“Smart,” says Punz admiringly. 

Dream shrugs, smirks. “Helps to be prepared just in case one of your friends decides to, y’know. Casually murder you.”

Punz straightens a bit, raises his eyebrows at Dream. “No hard feelings, man?” he asks. He doesn’t feel guilty, exactly, but he never, ever kills people without their consent, regardless of payment and who ordered the hit. Sure, it’s basic human decency, but it’s also a creed Punz has taken to heart. Just because someone has participated in explicitly deadly sporting events like Championship doesn’t mean they’re open to being killed in everyday life. 

Dream’s smirk softens out and he says fondly, “No hard feelings,” then proceeds to drive his axe into Punz’s shield with so much force that it sticks. 

“Oh, what the _hell!”_ Punz cries as he braces himself behind the shield that he’d drawn up mostly out of surprise; then, struck by inspiration, he yanks his shield arm toward himself, intending to take Dream’s axe away from him. Dream’s grip on the handle doesn’t loosen, but it does get him off-balance, and Punz takes advantage of Dream’s stumble to swipe at him again. Dream jerks away with his axe in hand at the last second. 

He’s off-kilter again, though, this time having overcompensated backward; Punz darts forward, rams his shield into Dream’s to keep his shield arm occupied - Dream winces, hard, his focus diverted to his left arm - and Punz stabs.

And Punz is good at his job, right. He knows how to make a kill quick and painless and he always goes back to wherever the person spawned and chats amicably with them afterwards; it’s his thing.

So Punz stares up into Dream’s masked face, at the shocked gape of Dream’s mouth, the rivulet of scarlet that trickles down. Glances at his sword, buried up to the hilt in Dream’s chest, can feel blood running past the guard onto his knuckles. Waits for Dream to dissipate into dust so that Sapnap can get his request fulfilled and Punz can keep the diamonds and Dream can just - wake - up.

Dream coughs. Punz feels more than sees it, the fine mist of blood that sprays from his mouth, and he’s just forming the words “What the fuck,” when his hand loosens on the sword and Dream collapses down into the dirt.

Punz immediately crashes onto his knees, following him, twists to grab his pack and rifles through it looking for the potions he always keeps on him. The adrenaline is mutating now to a salient panic, something that makes his hands shake badly as he clumsily paws his way through two strengths and a swiftness, barely managing to locate the dusk-pink potion he was looking for. All the while, like shitty background music, Dream’s unsteady wheezing underscores the silence, and when Punz’s eyes flicker back up, unbidden, Dream’s looking at him, hands pressed to the fucking sword still stuck in his fucking chest, oh god. 

Punz utters a few phrases Bad would probably kick him for and grasps the hilt of his sword, nearly gags as his fingers slip in the gore, and rambles, “Okay okay, um, _fuck_ \- fuck, Dream, how the _shit_ are you - ah, I’m, uh, I’m gonna just - just yank it out, y’know, it’s just like fucking pulling teeth, only it’s a _goddamn sword_ \- I - ohmigod.” Punz is near hyperventilating, which is stupid, if anything Dream should be the one panicking, he’s the one with the _sword in his chest_. Punz knows when he’s dealt a fatal blow, and the wound Dream is currently afflicted with is more than fatal. “You should be at spawn by this point - I - no. I - Dream take my hand, please, please just - take a breath - ” Dream makes a rattly gasp of a sound that Punz thinks is probably an attempt at an inhale and that’s good enough for him: he jerks the sword from Dream’s torso.

As soon as the damn thing’s out Punz forces the regen pot onto Dream, drags him semi-upright in his arms, supporting him with one hand while tipping the potion down his throat with the other. Dream slops a fair bit of it, nearly choking at one point between the blood and the healing concoction, but Punz maintains composure through it all - which is to say, he curses and cries a little and makes sure at least a quarter of the potion made it into Dream. When the glass flask is empty Punz drops it into the grass beside him and presses his hand to the ugly wound, watching with something like disbelief and something like relief as the freckled skin knits back together sluggishly under the torn lime-green hoodie and bandages Dream wears like a fucking anime character.

He stops healing before the gash is completely gone, but as it is, mottled pink as though freshly bruised, he’ll be fine and dandy in a few days. Punz lets his hand fall away limply from Dream’s chest and for a quivering moment it’s perfectly silent in the forest outside the Dream SMP. 

Until Dream clears his throat and rasps, his voice completely trashed, “Thanks.”

Punz stares at Dream. All the feelings that rise in him at the single word must show on his face, because Dream cringes a little and reaches up to smear away some of the blood that had bubbled over from his mouth, saying, “I mean that literally. Not bitterly or anything like that. Just. Thank you for the regen.”

Punz is so gobsmacked he can’t even say “I just ran you through with a sword, bro,” but he does manage a somewhat coherent “I - you - _what.”_

“Um.” Dream bites his lip. “I’m hardy.”

“You - you’re _hardy.”_

Punz is torn between at least five different very strong emotions, and he’s taking his pick between rage, bewilderment, remorse, or a combination of all three when Dream leans back into the grass, out of Punz’s arms, fixes his gaze toward the bright blue sky, and says, voice completely even, “Nice assassination attempt, but you gotta aim better.”

All Punz can say in response is a strained, “I fucking hit one of your lungs and possibly your heart.”

Dream levels a completely deadpan look at him. “Dead center, too high up. You got distracted by the blood. At best, you got my spine.”

Punz sputters, “That is still your _spine,_ Dream.”

Dream shrugs. “Didn’t kill me enough for a regen pot to not do the trick.”

“I - I fucking - _Dream,”_ says Punz, and his voice breaks. He has about half a second to feel embarrassed about it before Dream nabs him by the forearms, pulls himself up with surprising strength for having lost a good liter of blood, and throws his arms around Punz in a hug. It’s a little disconcerting if only because both of them are still more or less covered in blood and Punz is still riding out the wake of the panic and Dream is trembling from the effort, but they cling to each other all the same, and Punz can’t tell if he’s comforting Dream or being comforted.

And maybe Punz knows better. Maybe Punz knows, at the back of his mind, that his sword aimed perfectly true, and that he at the very least got one of Dream’s vital organs. 

But Dream is hugging the absolute shit out of him, murmuring “Shh shh shh,” as he pats Punz’s back, and Punz is maybe tearing up again, and even if he’s not above bribery, he’s above trying to witch-hunt his friend for something he knows is beyond him.

(He does grief Dream’s base later, though, all in good faith. Diamonds, and whatnot. He replaces Dream’s entire floor with soul sand. Dream laughs until he cries. You know how it is.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> L’MANBERG FINALE SPOILERS IN END NOTES. TO THAT ONE COMMENTER THAT WAS SPOILED BY THE NOTES I AM SO FUCKING SORRY.
> 
> hey there's that chronic left arm injury i mentioned in chapter one. chekhov's gun and all that ey (ouch)
> 
> so. uh. yeah still in shambles. you know what really killed me? even more than president tubbo?? even more than "my finished symphony"???
> 
> _“you’re my son!”_


	7. wilbur (so about that date)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> L'MANBERG FINALE SPOILERS IN NOTES
> 
> remember when george and wilbur and dream trolled twitter. yeah that was funny and funny chapters are needed because in about six chapters this fic is going to go straight down angst road
> 
> just realized sleepyboysinc are canonically related in the smp now this makes my job so much easier and also so much more painful still haunted by “you’re my son” thanks mr. philza minecraft man it’s all i’ve thought about during the three exams i’ve had this week
> 
> while i’m adhering to quote unquote canon mostly for this fic, i can’t in good conscience keep the wilbur is fundy’s father aspect because i can’t think about it for longer than thirty seconds without either getting a headache or laughing my ass off so in the young god storyline that was a “dad friend” thing

“...and that’s basically how it went down - the fireworks were, of course, my idea, what with me being objectively the best sibling - I - Dream.” Wilbur squints at his friend. “Are you - are you messaging someone under the table.”

“No,” says Dream, like a liar. He hasn’t even made an attempt at hiding the fact that he’s texting someone like mad, his head bent over the chat screen. 

Wilbur can hear the faint echo of his heart cracking a little. “Dream, I’ve just spent fifteen minutes talking about my family, I’ve given you so much backstory. You mean to tell me you weren’t listening? That’s dating sim taboo.”

“It’s like a dog whistle, I need a specific frequency to hear anything and your voice isn’t it.”

“Ooh, ouch, that actually hurt a little. How on earth does your fiancé put up with it?”

Dream straightens up now, swiping the chat away. “Fundy’s the one who reminded me that I had this today, dressed me, and did my hair, so thank him for me even showing up,” he says with an air of suffering. In Wilbur’s humble opinion, Fundy did not do a bad job at all; Wilbur himself is perfectly capable of cleaning up for a date, thank you, so he’s in a buffed leather jacket and his favorite frayed jeans and a beanie to conceal his beanie hair, but Dream has been dressed in the complete opposite fashion direction: olive green jumper, cuffed jeans, hair plaited into a lumpy braid that, while passable, was definitely done by someone who needed to be talked through the braiding process. Eret had wolf-whistled on their way past the bakery Wilbur and Dream are currently sequestered in, which says everything that needs to be said. 

“What did he say about the whole ‘date’ thing?” asks Wilbur, purely out of curiosity. Fundy’s not really the jealous type and neither is Dream, but if Fundy flipped his shit for the bit Wilbur wants to know about it for blackmail purposes. 

Dream begins to fold origami out of his napkin. “He thought it was hilarious and laughed me right out of my house.” In a feat beyond the grasp of mankind, Dream presents Wilbur with the origami crane he’s folded in literally ten seconds. A pause, then, pained, “My own house, Wilbur. If he griefs it I’m gonna be so mad.”

“Bros don’t do that to other bros,” says Wilbur sagely, taking the proffered origami crane, skillfully ignoring the fact that he griefed his own brother’s house five hours ago. 

There’s a mildly awkward silence, cut short only by Niki sliding a pan of pizza between them onto the table, raising her eyebrows at Dream, and treading firmly on Wilbur’s foot in passing. Wilbur has no idea what subtextual message she was trying to send by rendering him unable to walk on his own for the next twenty minutes, but Dream thankfully seems to have gotten the point, because he clears his throat and says, “So, what do people actually talk about on first dates?”

Wilbur reaches for a slice of pizza - veg, because Niki and Fundy are the only people he trusts to make a good veg pizza - and replies airily, “Not a clue. I’ll be upfront, Dream, I only asked you to a pizza date because I wanted pizza.”

“I expected nothing less.” Dream transfers two slices to his plate, smirks at Wilbur. “I only said yes because I wanted pizza, too. Match made in heaven.”

Wilbur hums. “I thought you’d have some first-date experience. You know, with the whole fiancé thing.”

Dream’s head does this weird tilt-and-loll that Wilbur takes to mean he rolled his eyes. “It was all an elaborate and time-consuming ruse to get me to watch _Treasure Planet_ with him,” he says between bites, using his pizza to punctuate. “And it hardly counts, because all we did was fake-flirt and talk about the food and at one point I told him about a nightmare I had the night before.” He considers for a moment, then concedes, “All in all it was very cute, so I said yes when he asked me to marry him.”

Because Wilbur can’t help himself, he says, voice lilted in inquiry, “Fundy said you mumbled something about George and Sapnap...?”

“Thought one of them would cave and ask me to marry them first,” sighs Dream with a tinge of disappointment. “Like, they’re my best friends! What’re we gonna do, _not_ marry each other? I was only waiting because I knew both of them had plans to propose at some point and I didn’t really wanna ruin the stuff they’d prepped, but George married Ninja and Sapnap married Karl out of the blue and they both kinda had their hands full.”

Wilbur feels the need to interject with, “I’ve got plenty of dating experience. I’ve been turned down twenty-seven times, I feel like you ought to know.”

Dream hardly bats an eye. “If you’re unlucky, I’ll be your twenty-eighth.”

Nobody told Wilbur that his date was going to be as needlessly cruel as Dream is. “Alright, heartbreaker,” Wilbur says, trying not to make it seem like he’s going to make a breakdown in the booth of Niki and Fundy’s bakery. When the conversation feels like it’s about to go under again, Wilbur grasps at the straw Dream had offered him earlier. “So, uh. You said something about a nightmare?”

“What? Oh, yeah.” Dream leans back a little, chin tucked into his hand, as Wilbur digs into his third slice with gusto, hoping to choke down at least half of the pizza while Dream’s talking, because Niki and Fundy’s pizza literally haunts him at night. “Yeah, it was a while back, so the details are kind of fuzzy, but... hm. Okay, I think I got it.” Wilbur makes an attempt to maintain eye contact with Dream while avoiding burning the roof of his mouth. It seems to work; Dream jumps into his monologue.

“It was... I was in my room, I think. And there was an iron door in the place of my normal door.” Wilbur nearly chokes and Dream stomps on his foot under the table - thankfully not the one Niki damaged. “Oh my god, stop laughing. There was an iron door, so I turned around probably thinking I could leave through, like, the vent, maybe? And the room started filling up with water, or something...” Dream pauses, mouth pursed in thought. “Yeah, it filled up with water and I was, like, swimming through the vent, and there was another iron door _in the vent_ , so I drowned and woke up, I think. It was something like that.”

Wilbur comes up for air and tells Dream, “Wow, that is morbid.”

“Right? Fundy thought it was funny.”

“He would.” Wilbur pats some of the pizza grease from his face with his napkin, wracking his brain for a follow-up. “Uh, is this a serious conversation now? Should I respond with something serious?”

“That’s up to you.” Dream picks up his neglected second slice.

Well, Wilbur’s got plenty of niggling doubts and half-remembered nightmares to offer as icebreakers. “Let me think of something,” he says, then promptly blanks on all the slightly-awful things he’s experienced or thought of in the past half-month that he’d reflect on lying in bed at three in the morning. He flounders for a moment - the conversation’s flagging, and now it’s crawling, and now it’s on the verge of death - and in mild desperation he snatches up the first thing that occurs to him, that he’s been mulling over for the past week - “I’m worried about Tommy,” and oh. Oh, fuck, that was absolutely not the thing he wanted to say. He presses his fist to his mouth, but it’s too late; the admission has sunken into the conversation, irrevocable, unforgettable. 

Dream’s gaze shoots up to him, keen as a knife; he sets down the half-eaten slice and straightens out of his slouch. “Okay,” he says, low, prompting, and Wilbur’s words, forming a lump in his throat, unstick at Dream’s encouragement.

“I’m - he’s - he’s the littlest, you know, he’s always been the littlest to me, my youngest brother, the baby, all that. And I’m so glad he’s joined this world - I’m so glad you let him join, Dream.” Wilbur tries to convey with his pathetic words all the gratitude he’d felt pressing down onto his shoulders when Tommy had first spawned in and his face had lit up, how he’d taken a running leap off the spawn point and knocked Wilbur to the grass in a spectacular tackle hug. He doesn’t stop to gauge Dream’s reaction, though, because now he’s properly gotten started, and he knows if he stops now he won’t be able to pick it back up and then the half-confession will remain in the air between them forever. “But it’s - you know, it was all a bunch of chill twenty-somethings here until Tommy joined, and there’s always respawn, but - but Phil and Techno and I, we always tried to make sure he wouldn’t have to. He’s respawned plenty of times, what with how - how _rambunctious_ he is - but rarely because someone else killed him. It’s not that I think someone here will kill him out of malicious intent,” Wilbur tacks on hurriedly, “but death isn’t - isn’t like that, you know? Not to us. Not when we’re older and we’ve done it a lot. I’m just - ” Wilbur blows out a long, long breath, not really wanting to finish his sentence, to make his words permanent, to admit something that’s become a simmering truth for him on the back burner in his mind, “ - I’m just afraid for him, I suppose. For Tommy.”

A long silence follows, this time. Wilbur can’t make himself look up and face Dream, so he picks at the sad, partially-consumed crust on his plate, twiddles his thumbs a bit, keeps his eyes fixed firmly to the tabletop, all the while thinking, _Stupid, why’d you say that, now it’s awkward, who said he has to deal with your problems, ugh, idiot_ , a cold, curdling kind of sour in his gut, accompanying that buzzing hum of anxiety over Tommy that he’d already picked up, all contributing to an altogether unpleasant internal cacophony.

He’s so caught up in his self-admonishment that he jumps when he feels Dream’s hands on his.

“Dream, what - ” he begins, startled, but Dream takes a long breath, slow, steady, his fingers steady interlaced with Wilbur’s, and Wilbur unconsciously mirrors him, and as he does the needling fear, the sharp rebuke directed inward, the roil of unease, all just... 

Seeps out. 

Like a tide washing out to sea, like water going down the sink, it’s a breath and a blink and it’s gone, in its place a sort of newfound stolidity. He feels not unlike a newborn fawn, all wobbling limbs as he regains balance on the unfamiliar ground, but once he’s recalibrated he suddenly feels lighter, far better than he has in the past few days, and down to his bones it’s steady steady steady. 

Dream draws away just as abruptly as he’d latched on, and Wilbur glances up. “Dream?” he asks, confused, concerned, because there’s an edge to the sliver of Dream’s face he can see that wasn’t there before. 

Dream tucks his shoulders close, smiles, flashes the chat at Wilbur a bit too quickly for Wilbur to make anything out other than a long back-and-forth. “Callahan wants me to help him out with his base, he ran out of quartz,” he explains, grinning apologetically. Then, quieter, the line of his mouth straight and serious, “Thank you for telling me about Tommy. About how you feel. It - it doesn’t mean much, but I’ll look out for him, okay? I’ll keep an eye on him.” His voice goes softer, fiercer. “He won’t suffer on my watch.”

Caught off guard by Dream’s intensity, Wilbur nods a little meekly, and waves goodbye to Niki without really checking to see if she’s there or if she waves back as he follows Dream out to the main street. Wilbur rolls his shoulders, tips his head back, stares up into the early evening sky, still a pale orange; thinks of Tommy, probably causing madness and mayhem elsewhere in the server, and is surprised by the lack of faint foreboding that used to chase that thought. Still uncertain, he glances at Dream again, who’s shifting from foot to foot as he peers down at his screen.

Wilbur blurts, “I had a... I had a good time, thanks for the date,” his bravery abandoning him approximately halfway through the sentence, but he sticks it out for his friend’s sake, and he’s glad he did; Dream lights up, a genuine smile breaks out on his face, and he waves the chat away.

“Yeah, same,” he says, winding his fingers together. “I had a good time, too. And I’m glad you got some things off your chest.” He taps his knuckles against Wilbur’s chest cheekily before jogging away, calling over his shoulder, “Also hit me up whenever, Niki’s pizza’s so fuckin’ good!”

Wilbur watches Dream dart between two buildings and fade into the treeline, his jumper making him blend into the foliage even more than usual, his hand pressed to where Dream had punched him. It’s not the action itself that gives him pause.

It’s how hard Dream’s hand was shaking, how jittery he was before leaving. It’s the fact that Callahan lives in the opposite direction from where Dream took off toward, just a chunk or so away from the bakery. It’s the newfound steadiness, like ground planted anew beneath Wilbur’s feet, not giving out even when he thinks of his mischievous youngest brother.

Speaking of, the chat pings; Wilbur scrolls to the bottom, finds a message from Tommy in all caps that says “SO MY HOUSE IS CURRENTLY ON FRIE AND TUBBBO IS COOKING A PORK CHOP OVER IT I WOULD LIK E SOME HELP,” and snorts softly. 

He spares one more glance at the forest, at the last place he saw Dream’s silhouette, and, for no reason in particular, thinks, _Thanks_.

He sets off, whistling, checking his pack for a water bucket.


	8. skeppy (get wrecked noob)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had a serious internal debate with myself over whether to subtitle this chapter “get wrecked” or “get rekt” but even the twelve year old gamer gremlin within me couldn’t condone the latter so here we are
> 
> will fully admit this chapter gave me a lot of trouble. i have short outlines for every chapter finished now, but skeppy’s chapter was one of the less detailed ones, which is why this chapter took a lil while, i tried out a lot of different endings before i landed on one that i thought was satisfactory. thanks for your patience, everyone!

Skeppy has many, many redeeming qualities. Among them is his shining ability to pretend like he’s better at combat than he is, a valuable skill that bites him in the ass when Tommy fucking Innit soundly thrashes him in a casual fistfight and forces him to respawn. Skeppy’s never gonna live it down. Every time he sees him Tommy pantomimes vigorous stabbing; Skeppy’s so far beyond humiliation that he’s looped all the way back around into misery. 

Never let it be said, though, that Skeppy isn’t proactive. As long as he’s being bullied by a kid four years younger than him, he might as well train like hell for the next time he inevitably gets destroyed by the gremlin. 

“They’re gonna put it on my grave, Dream,” he says, trying not to sound like he’s begging. _“Skeppy, beloved, beaten to death by a toddler’s bare hands._ I think I’d come back to life to die of shame again.”

Dream is staring off into the distance with an expression so deeply somber it’s obvious he’s trying not to laugh. “Skeppy,” he intones gravely, “I’d be honored to teach you how to fight.”

Skeppy grabs Dream’s hands and says fervently, pumping them up and down, “You are a godsend,” which apparently is the tipping point for Dream, who wheezes so forcefully that Skeppy has to help him sit down because of how lightheaded he gets. 

“Okay, so,” Dream finally manages after a solid one-minute spell of laughter, “how good are you in a fight right now? Like, how are your fundamentals? You been trained at all, or anything like that?”

“I could probably beat Bad in best of five.”

“That bad, huh?”

The spitfire rage that jumps to his throat is second-nature, a knee-jerk reaction, building a barrier brick by brick for him and Bad against people who’d try to shit on his friend. “Hey, watch it,” he snaps. “Bad’s _good_ , fuck off - ”

Dream puts up his hands immediately, a placating gesture. “Sorry, that was in bad taste,” he says apologetically; it’s the note of remorse in his voice, stricken, that gets Skeppy to lower his hackles. “I play Bad in manhunts, he _is_ good, I know.” He waits for Skeppy to nod at him before continuing. “Sorry, so what I meant is: you’re on the good side. Any specialties? Some people tend to focus heavily on ranged, others are good in melee, some focus on potions... axe users, sword users, there are a lot of different options. Some people are solid in all areas or just haven’t really thought about it.”

It’s like hearing a lecture in school: in one ear, out the other. It’s not that what Dream’s saying isn’t fascinating, it’s just that Skeppy absorbs information better when it’s happening to him than when it’s being presented to him. “I, uh,” he says, shuffling slightly, “I’m not sure. Is it fine if we do, like, a preliminary spar or something?”

“And figure it out from there? Sure. Whatever works for you.” Dream strides over to the chest he’d set up earlier, roots through it, tosses a wooden sword to Skeppy and extricates a wooden axe for himself. 

“It’s a good tester weapon,” he says, when Skeppy looks down at the sword consideringly. “Do you want something else?”

“No, no, this is fine.” Skeppy steps back and takes a few experimental swings. The weight of it makes him just a bit nostalgic; wooden swords are most children’s first weapon, after all. The familiar motion relaxes him more than he expected, and he almost gets concussed when Dream hurls a shield at him next. 

“Dream, what the hell,” he yelps, catching it in the nick of time. The shield’s clearly a well-loved one; it’s pretty beaten-up, and upon closer inspection there are several deep gouges in it that look like they’ve been made with an axe. Skeppy eyes the axe Dream’s holding warily. 

Dream notices his gaze and grins wickedly. “I promise I won’t break a shield today,” he says, sounding not at all sincere.

“How does Bad have the balls to hunt you, you’re terrifying,” Skeppy tells him faintly. Dream cackles and adjusts his own shield, also sporting a fair number of gashes. “He has no fear.”

“Yeah, you’re not wrong.” Dream lays his axe to the grass, rolls his shoulders, leans his weight to either side in a brief stretch. Skeppy quickly copies him. When Dream straightens up, Skeppy does another few practice swipes, keeping his shield up this time. He’s not the best at shieldwork, with his go-to strategy just being to keep it up all the time rather than find any kind of rhythm, but it works for the most part so he’s never felt the need to change it. In a similar vein, he prefers swords over axes mostly because he’s always used the former, even after the old gods made the axes more powerful in a pinch, because Skeppy doesn’t like conditional things and he has a better chance at getting a hit with a sword than a crit with an axe. He’s a textbook melee fighter. 

When he draws back, Dream has cocked his head to one side, chewing on his lip in concentration. He scans Skeppy up and down and declares, “You’re a textbook melee fighter.”

Skeppy does a double-take. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“It’s just a thing. If you want to fight Tommy and win, though, you’re gonna want to improve your shieldwork or diversify your weaponry.” Dream spins his axe in his hand and hefts up his shield as he explains. “Tommy’s combat style is pretty skewed toward his agility. His main strength is in his knowledge rather than his application, but because of that he’s smart about where and how to take the fight. It’s similar to my style, which is helpful.”

“Why?” asks Skeppy, then shrieks and ducks under his shield when Dream pounces on him, weapon wound up behind his head. The shock of the axe hitting the shield reverberates into Skeppy’s bones.

“Just a quick bout to get a better read, yeah?” says Dream amicably, his tone impossibly mild for someone who’s kicking Skeppy’s feet out from under him. Skeppy makes a garbled sound of terror and outrage in response and rolls to his feet.

The “bout” ends up lasting around two minutes and concludes with Dream sitting on Skeppy’s back, giving him tips on how to neaten his movements and pointing out what mistakes he’d made while Skeppy howls profanities. To Skeppy’s credit, he did manage to knock the wind out of Dream with a last-ditch swipe to the stomach, but Dream had used his existing momentum to take Skeppy down with him and honestly the last twenty seconds of the mock fight were just them wrestling in the dirt like a pair of idiots. 

That isn’t to say Skeppy spends the entire day getting bullied by Dream. After letting Skeppy up, Dream walks him slowly through his thought process in fights, adjusts Skeppy’s grip so that he doesn’t sprain his wrist if someone hits his sword at just the right angle. Has him choose between a crossbow and bow and doesn’t say a word when Skeppy decides on the bow, even though Skeppy knows Dream always goes for crossbows in long-range combat and the bow is kind of a predictable choice. Dream even manages to cram an impromptu lesson on shieldwork in before the sun sets, directing Skeppy on how to use a shield as a weapon by forcing all his weight behind it, demonstrates it himself by ramming his shield into Skeppy’s then wincing badly and breaking form. They end up taking a break after that, Skeppy hovering worriedly over Dream while he laughs off the concern and re-binds the bandages he always keeps wrapped around his left arm. 

It’s familiarizing, in a weird way. Skeppy’s read the dusty, antiquated combat manuals from stronghold libraries, he knows all the cheesy lines about the ironclad bonds forged through battle or whatever, but it’s the first time he actually feels like he’s gotten to know someone better just because they’ve beaten each other up. Dream has been a sort of distant figure in Skeppy’s life on the server, the nebulous world owner that was more a friend of a friend through Bad than any kind of personal acquaintance, but sitting in the last rays of sunset, doodling a triangle into the dirt at their feet with Dream’s wooden training axe as Dream re-loops the bandages around his arm, Skeppy feels far more camaraderie with Dream than he ever has before. It’s what makes him help Dream knot the cloth at his shoulder when he tries to reach and flinches, what makes him invite Dream to dinner with him and Bad, what makes him feel all sappy inside when Dream lights up.

Of course, for all the warm and fuzzies, it was still a lesson in combat, and Skeppy still lacks a sense of self-preservation and forethought, so he challenges Tommy to a best-of-five the very next day. Tommy, who sports a similar lack of any kind of survival instinct, immediately agrees, and the duel is promptly scheduled for the afternoon of the same day. Skeppy spends the intermediate seven hours harvesting and replanting melons for Bad in a grown-up form of time-out for getting himself involved in a duel that his best friend thinks is totally unnecessary.

Low-grade anxiety gets the better of him and Skeppy turns up at the “arena” (more like Eret’s temporarily redecorated front lawn) about thirty minutes early, antsy with nerves. It’s probably a good thing he came early, since they’re going to be duking it out with diamond gear; Skeppy takes the time to get used to the different heft of the questionably-sourced diamond sword, discreetly breaks in the bow he’s meant to use with a few shots into a nearby pillar. Unfortunately, by the time he’s sufficiently warmed up, a small crowd has trickled in, settled on blankets and lawn chairs, cheering and waving. It should probably galvanize Skeppy; all it does is make him nervous all over again.

Someone descends upon him all of a sudden and Skeppy whirls with an aborted noise of surprise. If it weren’t for his will of fucking iron, Dream might have a broken nose - mask - right about now. Dream clearly didn’t feel the lethality of Skeppy’s averted attack; he grins and plucks at Skeppy’s sleeve brightly while Skeppy gapes at him.

“How’re you feeling? Ready to own this fight?” Dream nudges Skeppy’s bow, abandoned off to the side, with his toe. “I saw you breaking it in, by the way, that was smart.” He focuses back on Skeppy, smiling, then pauses. The smile wavers, and he leans in, looking him over. Skeppy has no idea what to do under the sudden scrutiny, so he just inches back and waves weakly at him.

“...How are you actually feeling, Skeppy?” asks Dream finally, and Skeppy would’ve played it way the fuck off if it weren’t for the indiscernible undertone to his voice, searching, compassionate, a vague film of concern overlapping it all. It’s such a parent-friend thing to say and such a parent-friend tone that it was said in that Skeppy’s train of thought derails completely and he stares blankly at Dream for what ends up being a mildly awkward amount of time before he reboots.

“Oh, uh.” Skeppy rubs the back of his neck. He’s open with his emotions, he always has been; he and Bad have been always been the resident oversharing best friend duo, able to read each other easily but preferring to have their feelings articulated, always using their words first. Skeppy tries not to deflect if he can, even if his conversation partner isn’t Bad. “Kinda nervous. It’s not like I thought I had it in the bag or anything, but I kinda jumped into this without really thinking about it.” He pauses, then says with as much dignity as he can muster, “And I’m kinda afraid of getting my ass kicked by a child again.”

Dream snorts. “Yeah, Tommy has that effect. It’s like we all lose a hundred IQ points when we’re around him while his brainpower increases exponentially, it’s super weird.” He hesitates for a millisecond, and Skeppy thinks Dream’s eyes might have flickered to the crowd, then he nods gently toward the small cluster of onlookers as he steps closer. “Oh, by the way - there’s Bad, he came to cheer you on.”

Skeppy immediately straightens up, shades his eyes from the late afternoon sun and peers until he spots a dark, hooded figure with his hair snarled in his horns. When their eyes meet Bad hops to his feet and begins to screech his encouragement so loudly that Callahan, beside him, relocates to the other end of the lawn.

It’s like magic - the tangled nerves that had balled up behind his sternum and made something in his lungs feel tight, made his grip on his sword a little too strong where Dream had told him yesterday to loosen up, relaxes. That whisper-shout anxiety thrumming in the back of his mind eases, and he breathes way easier than he had been just seconds before. Skeppy stops, smiles to himself; such is the power of friendship, or something like that.

He turns to Dream to shoo him away, since Tommy has taken his place on the other end of the field and is doing very messy cartwheels in order to hype up his chunk of the audience, and is startled when Dream sways away instead of walking. It’s alarming enough in the split second that Skeppy reaches out to steady him, but Dream glances up again and the line of his mouth is a solid smile as he says, “Sorry, I’m fine, I just looked into the sun and it made me dizzy,” and waves him off. 

The sound of a gong echoes out over the lawn, and the chitchant dies down to a manageable buzz; Skeppy looks over at the steps to see Eret, holding a gong the size of their head, jabbing their mallet at Dream’s direction and urging him off the field. Dream blows Eret a kiss that Eret pretends to wipe off and takes off for Bad’s direction, calling over his shoulder, “I’m rooting for you, dude!”

With that warming parting shot, Eret rings the gong again with an overly showy “Let the games begin!” which wasn’t really needed, as Tommy and Skeppy both dove at each other before Eret had even raised their mallet; still, without the dregs of the sluggishly cold anxiety slowing him down, Skeppy feels way better than he had earlier, even going so far as to execute a few of Dream’s more complicated tricks in the second round and getting an admiring whistle from Tommy for his troubles.

And even though Skeppy emerges defeated as he trudges dramatically into Bad’s arms, he’s muffling a grin into his best friend’s shoulder, because even if he lost he lost two to three, and Bad stops every person leaving the lawn by boasting, “My best friend just beat Tommy twice!” 

Skeppy catches Dream’s eye as the event’s finally winding down. Dream looks strangely small, and it might be the way the light plays off of the stone bricks but his pallor is a bit off. Still, he flashes a huge smile at Skeppy and two thumbs up, and Skeppy does a little victory dance back, and they both laugh until long, long after the arena is empty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> stay in school kids it makes you better at pvp quoth sun tzu and pythagoras


	9. jack (mandatory volunteering)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i may be playing up tommy’s pyromaniac tendencies but what better way to destroy the structures on a server mostly comprised of wood planks?

It takes three uncontrolled burnings for Dream to finally step in; it’s so early in the morning it may as well be night, and Jack is bleary enough not to be able to tell whether he’s hungry or tired, and even Tubbo looks wrung out as Tommy waves his flint and steel with a vigor entirely unbefitting of someone who’s been awake for about thirty hours. Jack ducks his head for a second to rub his eyes, and when he looks back up Tommy’s flint and steel is in Dream’s hand and Tommy’s yelling curses. The appearance is so sudden Jack has to blink a few times before the fact that Dream is actually there sinks in.

The world owner’s hair is a wild tangle and he’s dressed in a shirt that looks a few sizes too big and without his netherite armor he doesn’t take up as much space, but he’s got the flint and steel and the displeased set to his mouth is far more threatening than it has any right to be. Jack gulps involuntarily. 

“Tommy,” Dream says, his voice gravelly with sleep and thus way scarier than usual, “what the fuck.”

Tommy doesn’t even bat an eye. “Give my flint and steel back, you arse,” he snaps, “or I’ll go about setting the Community House on fire as well.”

Dream’s voice, if possible, goes even flatter. “Tommy.”

Jack finds his voice. “Hey, Tommy,” he suggests as lightly as he can, “I think we ought to head home and go to sleep.”

If looks could kill, Jack would be a smoldering heap on the street. As it is, illuminated by the blaze coming off of the wooden contemporary-art statue someone set up in front of the Community House as a joke, Tommy’s eyes are acid, and Jack hurriedly averts his gaze.

There’s a dead silent stand-off between Tommy and Dream disrupted only by the crackle of fire.

Ultimately it’s Tubbo who comes to the rescue - he swiftly kicks Tommy in the back of the knee, watches him go down, howling, with the air of a bird watching Icarus fall from the sky, plucks the flint and steel from Dream’s slack hand, and says, “Goodnight, everybody,” with endless cheer in his voice. Jack doesn’t fuck around and find out - he obeys what could be Tubbo or Big Law or Big Crime without another word and goes the hell to bed.

When he does wake up the next morning, he wishes he hadn’t; there are dozens of acacia-wood signs plastered over his house, all demanding he come to the Community House as soon as possible. Jack briefly contemplates turning on his heel, going back to his bed, and sleeping until whatever next mass destruction Tommy and Tubbo cause next, but his self-preservation instincts win out, and nine thirty finds him at the gates of the Community House in full diamond, fidgeting nervously.

“Hey,” comes a voice from behind him. Jack, caught off guard, whips around and almost runs into Dream, who grins, quick and bright as lightning, when he sees how decked-out Jack is. “Full diamond already? You popped off.”

“Dream! Hi. Why’d you call?” Jack leans against the fence and crosses his arms loosely, hoping to convey casualness and confidence. To his immense relief, Dream mirrors him, leaning back against his own side of the fence with an easy smile. Jack isn’t ashamed to admit the world owner intimidates him a little bit, that he kind of wants to make a good impression. Dream’s reputation precedes him; at twenty-one he’s a renowned and respected fighter and traceur and apparently has a minor god or two under his thumb, if the size of the Dream SMP and his frequent off-world manhunts are anything to go off of. Aside from that, he’s just a pretty chill dude, and Jack really doesn’t want to get on his nerves, since his position in the server is probably on shaky ground at best; he’s only the friend of a friend, after all.

“Yeah, sorry to call you so early.” Dream is apparently in the habit of thumbing the blade of his axe while he talks, which is a terrifying habit. “Well, you know how you’re the newest person on this world, right?” 

Jack nods warily, not sure where the line of questioning is headed. Dream notices the caution and smirks.

“And since you’re the newcomer, you’re technically like an underclassman - and underclassmen have to do everything their upperclassmen tell them, those are just the rules.” Dream strides over and, without warning, places three stacks of various wood planks into Jack’s surprised arms. When Jack looks up at Dream with dawning horror in his eyes, Dream winks. 

“Come on, Jack, we’re on cleanup duty.”

While at first the task seems daunting - Tommy did set fire to three incredibly spaced-out residential areas, and Jack fancies the people who live there might be just a tad pissed off - it turns out to be not all that bad. Dream somehow managed to convince the four people whose houses suffered not to shoot Jack on sight, so he gets to apologize to Ponk, Alyssa, Callahan, and George, who all assure him that it wasn’t his fault and make assorted vague threats toward Tommy that Jack highly suspects will never be carried out. The hardest part is honestly the building, both because of his own perfectionism and because Dream is really particular about resetting things to exactly as they used to be. They end up spending an inordinate amount of time patching up Callahan’s base since he’d had a complicated setup of quartz and vines over the bunker he camps out in and both he and Dream only half-remember it, so they kept building it, tearing it down, and rebuilding it because either Callahan or Dream thought it didn’t look quite right.

By the time they reach what used to be the statue in front of the Community House, Jack is torn between exhaustion and the kind of self-aware satisfaction you get from community work. He stretches his arms for what must be the fifth time in the past fifteen minutes, wary of waking up tomorrow morning as nothing but a cluster of muscle aches, and flicks a splinter out of his hand absentmindedly as he follows Dream to the sad pile of sticks that used to be, according to the unscathed sign tacked to the base, “The Metaphor”. 

“Cool name,” he offers. Dream shrugs and grins.

“Somebody’s idea of a joke, but I thought it looked nice,” he says fondly, brushing some of the ashes off of the base and arranging planks in their place. “The other things were whatever, but Tommy burning this was kind of the last straw for me.”

“You could’ve killed him,” Jack says, an unspoken question in his voice as he hands Dream some of his own planks, not quite familiar enough with the former statue to recreate it. Dream takes the planks, lines them up to either side, and sighs.

“I could have,” he admits. His mouth goes flat, then; sharp, unyielding. “But no matter if he respawns, that’s still killing.” A pause. Quiet, almost inaudible, “I don’t kill if I don’t have to, Jack.”

Jack shoots a look at Dream, who’s now completely absorbed by the statue. The qualities of Dream Jack’s picked up on are pretty at odds with the mental image Jack had built up through the rumors and tidbits of information he’d been fed through Tubbo; the cynical, battle-hardened, grim warrior he’d always kind of expected Dream to be has now largely been replaced by an earnest person with a heart of gold, quick to laugh, a smile always halfway to his face. The last sentence he’d let slip - “I don’t kill if I don't have to” - shakes Jack more than he’d like to admit. He’s never really thought of respawn like that; it’s just a given, the failsafe given to humans by the old gods, the one thing that, if nothing else, he’s always taken for granted. 

He doesn’t know why it’s different for Dream, but it just is. He doesn’t believe in permanence the way Jack does. It’s hard to say why, and to be honest, Jack doesn’t really want to know why; in a stupid way, it feels like it’ll destroy the magic, the air of light mystery Dream still manages to evoke in Jack despite how much today humanized Dream for him. Still, it establishes itself in Jack’s own little world, another plain fact of life - the sun goes down, the humans respawn, Dream doesn’t kill without reason.

“There we go!”

Jack’s jerked back into reality by Dream’s exclamation; he watches, hands tucked into his pockets, as Dream steps back, arms outstretched, grinning widely, the statue rebuilt before him. Dream backs up to where Jack’s standing and they both consider the statue for a moment. Dream asks presently, “Does it look the same as before?”

Jack could scrutinize the statue all he wanted and still not know. “Dude, I couldn’t tell you. It looks fine to me.”

His uncertainty doesn’t seem to bother Dream, who studies “The Metaphor” for another minute before nodding and saying, “Yeah, I think this is as good as it’s gonna get. Thanks for all the help, man.” 

Relief floods Jack at the words of dismissal that he’s been waiting to hear all day. As enlightening and character-building the day has been, Jack just really wants a shower and to sleep til next century right now. The temptation of rest overpowers his common sense and he nearly leaves without even a farewell before he catches himself and turns back around to say goodbye and pauses. 

Dream has his hand on the janky wooden statue, indescribable fondness in the line of his smile. He smooths his thumb over the grooves of “The Metaphor” and something - a whisper, a prayer, an encouragement - passes from Dream to the statue. It’s over in a moment and Dream stands, stretches like a cat, pulls his hair out of the bun he’d compressed it into during lunch; notices Jack still standing there, confused, his hand held halfway up but with no particular purpose, and waves goodbye brightly. Jack waves back and treks home, unsure what to make of the little scene he’d witnessed. 

Of course, his friends can’t leave well enough alone, and Jack gets dragged out of bed in the wee hours of the morning by Tubbo and Tommy and the three make their way over to “The Metaphor” again, Jack with a growing feeling of dread in his stomach when he realizes where they’re headed. He briefly considers stopping Tommy - the statue seemed important to Dream, after all - but when he opens his mouth to do so, Tubbo shakes his head at him surreptitiously, and Jack’s jaw snaps shut. Honestly, he was resigned to this outcome by the time Tubbo had shaken his shoulder - Tommy’s like a force of nature, inevitable, inescapable. If he wants to set things on fire only a god could stop him. 

They reach the statue with little fanfare. Tommy rummages through his pockets for quite some time before finally crowing triumphantly and holding up four fire charges. Jack winces when he sees the number - Dream will probably put him on rebuilding duty again unless someone new is brought in between now and whenever someone discovers this round of arson, and he was really looking forward to farming for netherite today. 

“Dream’s gonna lose his shit,” says Tommy gleefully, which is exactly the opposite tone Jack would have taken to make that statement, as he holds the fire charge close to the statue’s base. In the split second before Tommy lights it up, it occurs to Jack that Dream must be really fond of Tommy and Tubbo to let this shit happen all the time in his world. 

Tommy ignites the fire charge.

...Nothing happens. 

Jack, Tubbo, and Tommy all stare at the smoldering remains of the fire charge in Tommy’s hand, then at the untouched statue. Not even a puff of smoke. 

“What the fuck,” says Tommy. 

“That’s weird,” muses Tubbo. 

Jack says nothing. 

Tommy, probably thinking it might have been a fluke, lights another fire charge. Once again, “The Metaphor” is completely free of flame. Tommy sputters in what started as confusion but what’s building into outrage. 

And as Tommy curses the tips of his own ears red and Tubbo looks over the statue thoughtfully, Jack thinks of Purpled’s house, combustion-proofed two weeks past. Thinks of Dream, his hand laid gently on “The Metaphor.” The softness of his smile. 

Tommy uses his last fire charge and says something that makes Jack’s hair stand on end when it doesn’t work. 

Jack mulls over what he’s thought of one last time before letting it slip out of his fingers with finality. It’s not his business. It’s probably a world-owner thing, he tells himself. It’s Dream’s world, and he respects Dream too much to pry. 

Even if, a voice at the back of his head whispers traitorously, only the people who created the world can manipulate it like this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jack manifold more like jack fanifold am i right folks
> 
> for real, i think delving into dream’s reputation in this chapter was interesting, because up til now the characters have had at least a distant sort of equal relationship with dream; even though dream was kind of a stranger to skeppy they at least had a link in bad. jack is way more removed from dream’s social circle as someone who came to the smp through tubbo, who’s also arguably a little less acquainted with dream (at least at this point in the storyline), so it was fun imagining the ways in which dream might have broken the preconceived notions of himself others held.


	10. ant (twist the knife)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: graphic descriptions of violence, injuries, and death. 
> 
> heyo! i’ve realized the premise/direction of the fic might be a bit confusing by this point in the story (nearly halfway there!). long story short, up until chapter thirteen, it’s going to be a bunch of drabbles mostly unrelated to each other; isolated instances of dream doing something Not Human. from chapter thirteen on, the fic will be loosely chronological, and if i tell you where the final chapter will lead to it’ll be a huge spoiler, but suffice it to say chapter thirteen on will basically be one long leadup to a certain fraught canonical event =)
> 
> also just pretend antfrost has been on the dream smp for longer than he actually has been okay please i spent so long on this chapter only to realize it fucks with the continuity i was trying to establish just pretend ant has been on the server since like when tommy first joined okay thanks

There’s a reason they do the manhunts, and it’s not just for them to horse around and try to kill one another for a few days. Ant is the newcomer but he’s always been good at reading people and from the outset he could tell that Dream was someone filled to the brim with the restlessness that characterizes humans, that never-settling wanderlust, and his brain works too fast for the rest of his body sometimes, and he just needs an outlet. It’s part of why he eggs Tommy on in their little fights, why he holds onto those discs even though he doesn’t need them, why he gets that delighted look on his face when someone tells him that Tommy’s griefed them or stolen from them or otherwise ruined their morning. Just as much as Tommy wants to blow things up, Dream wants to blow things up back. Ant thinks they’re remarkably similar, not that anyone else seems to recognize that. 

It can be argued that Dream copes with his own overabundant energy better. Where Tommy looses destruction upon his neighbors, Dream bribes whatever minor god he’s got up his sleeve and sets up an untouched world for them to stretch their legs in. Ant’s first hunt was terrifying, but he caught on quickly, and now, around ten or twenty hunts in, he’s getting confident. Sure, he’s not combat-oriented like Sapnap, nor does he have the benefit of experience, like George and Bad, but he’s the fastest-thinking on his feet and makes split-second decisions the quickest of their little hunter group, a useful skill against Dream, whose on-the-fly thinking is unmatched. 

Still, there are occasions when even Dream can’t win. When all his meticulous planning falls through, or his steady legs fail him, or his level head deserts him. It’s how the hunters managed to trap him in lava that one time, and how Bad managed to knock Dream out with a single punch that other time. The shorter manhunts that never get publicized: they trap Dream in a ravine early on, or camp the Nether portals he sets up and cage him in, or, on one memorable occasion, portal trap him thirty minutes in and wait until he surrenders glumly.

This is the first time, however, that Dream’s called off the manhunt first.

George and Bad are sat by their furnaces and Sapnap and Ant are combing the treeline when they’re contacted. They’re all connected via voice chat for manhunts so that Dream can hear everything they’re saying and the hunters can all hear what Dream’s saying, and over the call Dream’s breath picks up. Ant and Sapnap both perk up - it’s a surefire sign Dream’s running, and they both know he’s probably triggered something that could end the manhunt early - but then they hear Dream’s heels dig in cobblestone as he halts, and when he speaks, his voice is unsteady, high: _“Guys, shit, shit_ \- guys.”

Ant isn’t sure what to make of it but Sapnap’s face immediately clouds. He tilts his face closer to his wrist, his end of the call, and answers, “Yeah, dude. What’s wrong?” 

Bad head pops up from behind the furnaces, his brow furrowed. “Was that Dream?” he asks, tone uncertain.

“Yeah. Dream,” George says urgently, standing and removing their iron from the furnace, his face set in stone. Ant hasn’t quite picked up on what’s going on yet, but the clear alarm in George’s voice gets to him, and he packs up the furnaces as Bad hurriedly removes the mutton they were cooking. “Dream, what is it?”

 _“Oh god. Oh - shit!”_ There’s the unmistakable sound of a crossbow bolt being fired, then a grunt of pain from somewhere further off and a cut-off sound of shock from Dream. _“Fuck! I’m such an idiot, oh god, oh god.”_

Ant’s hackles rise as the sounds of fighting and of destruction begin to filter over the call, chilling him down to the bone. When he looks up from the chat, George and Sapnap and Bad are all exchanging identical looks of horror, which only frightens him more. There’s no way Dream could be in the middle of a battle on the scale Ant can discern - they’re in an untouched world. There’s nothing here other than the hunters who could fight Dream, right?

George goes pale all of a sudden, hand shooting up to cover his mouth. It does little to muffle his gasp. Bad grabs his arm, but George doesn’t seem to notice; he brings his chat to his face and demands, voice strung high, “Dream, is that a raid? _Have you triggered a raid?”_

 _“George,”_ Dream says tightly, the sound of an axe singing underscoring his words, _“George, Ant, Bad, Sapnap, I’m calling off the manhunt, it’s off - please come help, I - ”_ his voice breaks slightly as the thunk of an arrow in a shield interrupts him, _“I can’t protect this village by myself, it’s a big one.”_

Sapnap’s hands fly up to his hair; he tugs off his headband and re-ties it more firmly, his mouth set in a grim line. “Coords,” he says to Dream, then to Ant, “drop the furnaces, bro, we’re not gonna need them anymore,” and to George, “and we have enough ender pearls left, let’s all take two and fucking book it.” Ant drops the furnaces immediately, his thoughts already picking up speed; as Sapnap jots down Dream’s coordinates, Ant divvies up their supplies equally, passing out pork chops and handing Bad his iron boots because Bad only has a helmet. When Sapnap looks up, Ant nods at him and sets his jaw as they all begin to teleport to where Dream is.

It’s too far off to pearl all the way, but they cut a solid chunk of running time thanks to the two teleports. They’re about six hundred chunks away when their pearls run out, which means it’ll take around twenty-five minutes if they sprint like their lives depend on it. Sapnap leads the pack and Ant takes the rear, all tense from the fighting they can hear over the call. Dream keeps them updated, which Ant appreciates; it’s worse, he thinks, if you don’t know how the person you can’t see is faring. 

At some point Bad pants, “Dream, are you okay?” into the call, and Dream, instead of answering the question, says, brittle, _“Bad, I’m trying, but there’s so many, the villagers - Bad, they_ keep dying,” which makes George curse and pick up his pace. Bad doesn’t even reprimand him. 

Ant is the first one to spot the plumes of smoke waning into the sky. He shouts incomprehensibly and points when the others look at him in confusion, even as his stomach drops; smoke is a bad sign. Illagers only start setting things on fire when they believe their victory is assured and most of the living things in the village are dead, moving on from their plundering and destroying the proof of their carnage. When they get a chunk or two closer, the distant guttural wails of dying villagers and the triumphant howls of illagers become audible, and Ant thinks he might be sick, feeling dread pool in his gut. Almost without thought, his eyes drift down to his wrist; they haven’t heard anything from Dream’s end for a while...

The call suddenly _screams._ Ant jerks away from his wrist, startled, and they all grind to a halt as they stare first at the chat, then at each other. Sapnap looks stricken; Bad is near tears. 

George’s knuckles are white on his wrist as he demands, “Dream - ”

 _“DON’T COME!”_ Dream’s voice splinters through the call, high, teetering. It’s desperately far from what he normally sounds like - easygoing, collected, impish - and Ant’s heart squeezes in his chest, makes him choke up, as he tries to reconcile the completely nonsensical thing Dream’s saying with his shaking, strange tone. 

Bad apparently agrees. “Dream, you muffinhead, are you _joking?_ We’re going, right now - ” Bad’s face crumples, and he near begs, “ - hang on, just hang in there, okay - ”

“Don’t,” Dream begs back, not indicating he’s heard Bad at all. _“Don’t come here, don’t, I’ve - ”_ his voice hitches, and what sounds like cloth rustling - like, Ant suddenly realizes with a roll of nausea, blood on flesh - _“I... I fought them off as hard as I could - I did everything I could, they’re - for... for them, I.... oh, oh...”_

The call goes dead silent. Ant’s breath gets stuck in his throat.

“Dream,” he says, even though it comes out strangled. He holds his wrist right up to his mouth and chokes out, “Dream, Dream!” because shit, oh god, _shit, his friend’s not answering the fucking call._

For a horrible, swelling, spiralling second, none of them can say anything. It’s just Ant and George and Sapnap and Bad, the earth falling out from under them, eyes round as ender pearls, each staring down at their wrists with absolute, crushing terror burgeoning in the quiet they let unspool between them.

“Go, go, _go,”_ Sapnap yells, snapping Ant out of the gaping chasm of despair that nearly swallowed him whole. Sapnap’s burst into a dead sprint, head tucked close to his chest, and by the time Ant begins to run after him Sapnap’s nearly a chunk ahead. The freezing dregs of fear are still somewhere at the back of Ant’s mind, but it’s been replaced by the blaring alarm in his head that urges him forward, makes him nearly trip for how fast he’s sprinting, his friends and fellow hunters and the voice at the back of his head all shouting _Go, go, go._

Ant’s so concentrated on going as fast as he can that he rams into Bad, who was right in front of him, when Bad stops abruptly. Ant steadies himself on Bad’s shoulder and looks up and immediately wishes he hadn’t.

The village is in fucking shambles. The roofs are all torn up, the cobblestone walkways buckled from the weight of ravager hooves. A nearby staircase has been dismembered and thrown every which way, and as they troop in cautiously, Ant stumbles on a broken piece of it. The smoke is thick now; Bad pulls his checkered neckerchief up to cover his nose and mouth, and Ant copies him, tugging his shirt collar up over his face. 

Ant trips on something else when they venture further into the ruins of the village. He looks down and locks eyes with the disembowelled corpse of a villager.

Ant reels back, gagging, ignoring his friends as they call for him, realize what made him recoil, and lurch away themselves. Now that he looks down properly he can see them everywhere, strewn about the streets, broken bodies in doorways and blood spilling out past hay bales and stone steps. There are some illager corpses as well, gray and uneven and utterly vile with their hate-filled death masks and axe wounds. Ant can see a dead ravager from where he is, obscured partly by the ramshackle splintered planks of a collapsing house. Tendons rent from bone, viscera on the walls of the houses; Ant has to crouch down and take a few deep breaths, overwhelmed by the gore, the sheer violence. Nothing, he thinks with mild hysteria, could have survived this.

“Wait,” says George, his voice gone funny, and Ant pulls his head up with effort to see him pointing at something slumped at the base of the fountain, just below the shattered bell. It’s a heap of something red and green, and George’s words pick up speed, “Wait, is that - ”

 _“Dream,”_ breathes Ant, and staggers over two more bodies before he gets to his friend’s side. It’s Dream, somehow breathing, somehow fucking alive, sprawled out on his side. His hair is red, and so are spots on his sweatshirt and black undershirt; Ant hovers over Dream for a moment, uncertain, afraid to move him but afraid not to try.

In the end, Sapnap makes the decision for him; he’s the one who gets there next, makes a strangled noise, turns Dream with gentle, gentle hands and curses fast and low when they see Dream’s face. The serenely white mask Dream always wears is smeared crimson, cracked at the edges, and Ant reaches out without thinking and smooths his shaking hand over Dream’s face, and that’s when he realizes Dream’s saying something. 

“Oh, _Dream,”_ says George in horror, his voice drawing near; Ant tunes it out and leans over Dream, putting his ear close to Dream’s mouth, trying to catch what he’s saying, trying to tell if he’s even breathing, as Sapnap and Bad both begin pulling out materials for bandages and the crystal for their transport back to the Dream SMP.

“The... the children,” whispers Dream, voice quiet as a breeze but somehow perfectly clear. As soon as he hears those first few words, Ant gets the distinct impression that what Dream’s saying doesn’t belong to him. “They’ve gotten the children... they’ve gotten our houses... they’ll get us next, but...” Dream’s voice drops off to a sibilant, silvery hiss that makes Ant’s hair stand on end, murmuring in a voice that’s nearly not his, _No no no shh shh it’s alright take the pain take the fear shhhhh yes they will die but you can ease their burden yes they will die but they will not die hurting go to sleep sleep sleep..._

Ant straightens up quickly, covers for what he was doing by carding his trembling fingers through Dream’s bloody hair, looks up when Bad says tremulously, “I got Dream’s world’s signal. Let’s go back right now, I think Skeppy stocked up on regens a few days ago.” He can barely hear Sapnap and George agreeing tersely over the whirring of his mind, always at a hundred miles an hour, turning the cogs in his head. He picks up George and Sapnap’s packs on autopilot when the two heft up Dream between them, their expressions a wreck, and stumbles after them through the portal into their home world. He thinks a couple people were around them when they returned, and they screamed when they saw the bloody mess George and Sapnap were carrying. He’s not sure.

Ant knows that Dream wasn’t himself. What he said was what the villagers had felt, dying in their homes with crossbow bolts through their throats or ravager teeth in their sides. The grief, the anguish, the poisonous pain they must have felt dying, how hard Dream must have fought...

How he must have eased their pain...

Ant returns with a start to the present. He’s got half of a roll of bandages in his left hand and is supporting Dream’s head with his right. Bad is shouting orders in every direction while putting pressure on the worst of Dream’s injuries, a deep gash in his thigh and a stab wound through his side. George is clasping one of Dream’s hands and Sapnap is clenching the other, both trying to feed Dream cubes of a god apple one of them fished from their packs. Sam and Purpled, who must have been the two who cried out earlier, are both running off in different directions, one toward Bad and Skeppy’s house and the other to the Community House, probably in search of potions.

Ant looks down at Dream’s face, smattered with freckles and stained with blood, mouth slack in unconsciousness, golden hair nearly copper from the head wound. Almost chases after the train of thought he’d been following earlier.

Then he clamps down, firmly rejects the implications of it. Dream tried to save a village. When he couldn’t, he tried at least to help the villagers in it, and that’s that. Ant doesn’t care if Dream is something eldritch or whatever. He _doesn’t care._

And Ant presses his forehead to Dream’s with a vicious protectiveness and thinks, fierce, _I don’t give a fuck what you are, you’re still my ridiculous, self-sacrificing idiot of a friend._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two chapters in one day??? pog??????
> 
> i did maths for this chapter,, did you know sprint speed is give or take 5.6 m/s and a chunk is 16 by 16 blocks so 16 blocks lengthwise and 600 chunks is 9600 blocks so sprinting 600 chunks takes give or take 28.6 minutes? (i also got wildly distracted on reddit while researching that so uh. writer brain)
> 
> oh hey! that! in the italics! it’s the first time you’ve seen that, right? well, i’d keep an eye out for more of the like if i were you ;)


	11. karl (head in the shallows)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so.. how yall feelin after that last chapter?

Karl maintains an adrenaline high for about five hours after the Championship. 

In his defense, it was his first win - great - and his current win rate is 100% - outstanding - and to top it all off, he won alongside George, Dream, and Sapnap - over the fucking moon. Their performance was stellar. Karl replays it twice in his head during the informal afterparty, where people he knows mostly by word of mouth congratulate him and rib him a little and overall are so, so nice that Karl tears up a couple times during. 

The others of the Fuchsia Frankensteins team are elated, too. Sapnap, his Gryffindor necktie pushing his hair from his face in the place of his usual headband, gets a few congratulatory punches and gets blown plenty of kisses, much to his delight. George casts off his cloak about ten minutes in and gets into the nonalcoholic drinks not long after and at one point gets involuntarily roped into a massive conga line. Dream, face flushed, bright, hands out a few kisses himself, lets someone (probably Tubbo) take the green ribbon he’d tied his hair with, and lets Fundy whoop and sweep him off his feet into a bridal carry as everyone around them hoots. Karl pinches Sapnap discreetly and ends up getting carried for a short period of time, as well. 

It’s fun, almost more so than the Championship itself. Everyone’s inhibitions have basically been thrown out the window, and they’re all laughing and joking and openly complimenting each other without caring about whatever airs they put on in public. At some point, between his second and third slices of an ungodly large wedding cake with the words “MCC 11” piped haphazardly onto it, Karl spots Technoblade and Dream performing a spinning waltz in the middle of the dance floor, holding an excited conversation with a lot of gesturing involved. It’s the most animated Karl has ever seen Techno, which is why he double-takes, but the surprise quickly wears off and Karl polishes off the cake and sails away to find a dance partner himself, powered by his sugar rush. 

By the time they get back to Dream’s world, Karl has reached the “crash” stage of his sugar high, and judging by the others’ bleariness and the way they make several wrong turns before finding Karl’s house, he’s not the only one. It only takes a few seconds of exchanged glances before they unanimously and nonverbally agree that getting to their individual houses requires too much brainpower and pile wordlessly into Karl’s house. 

Karl doesn’t light any of the torches or lanterns because that would require fire, which he doesn’t trust himself with right now, and he ends up arranging some kind of tangled mattress-blanket nest in the middle of the living room floor for them to hibernate in for the next twenty-four hours. It looks pretty rough, but George sinks into it with a rapturous sigh, discards his clout goggles, rolls over onto his side, and immediately drops off into deep slumber, so Karl considers it a win. The rest of them, at least aware enough not to want to fall asleep in their MCC clothes, traipse off to different corners of the room to change into pajamas and each crawl under the sheets, Karl on one end and Dream on the other, Sapnap settling between Karl and George. It only takes ten seconds for Karl to pass the hell out. 

He jolts awake to the sound of someone having a nightmare.

Karl rises to a sitting position slowly, carefully, wary of waking Sapnap or George up, but Sapnap is snoring louder than a cannon blast and George has buried his head under two pillows, so Karl relaxes. He can barely see Dream through the gloom; what he can make out is an outline half-cocooned in a quilt shared with George, mask ghostly white in a nest of tousled hair, a hushed papery shudder the way someone’s breathing sounds when they’re afraid.

Karl feels his heart clench. He hates nightmares, has had them frequently since he was young, knows there’s really no good way to wake someone up without scaring them even more. He’s spent plenty of red-orange mornings trying to shake off the cobwebs of something horrible that never even happened. There’s not even any telling what Dream could be dreaming of, no pun intended - Karl’s close to Dream but not the way Sapnap and George are, and honestly his best guess is bad memories, or maybe something from manhunts; there have been times Sapnap visits Karl after a manhunt gone poorly and recounts small, detached details with a faraway look in his eyes. Karl’s a little out of his depth right now.

Dream chokes quietly. Karl squares his shoulders. Even if he’s unsure, he’s gotta wake Dream up - what kind of friend would he be to just sit by and watch Dream suffer just because of his own uncertainties?

Karl swallows and reaches over Sapnap to Dream, hesitates a moment when Dream’s shoulder shivers briefly under his hand. Grits his teeth and lays his hand ever so lightly on Dream’s arm with a whispered, “Dream, wake - ”

It happens so fast Karl can barely register it. The gleam of Dream’s eyes flashing open beneath the mask, the frantic _thunk_ of his back hitting the wall behind him, his hand curling into a fist, him slamming his fist into the wall. 

The ground _rolls_ , louder than thunder. The entire slab of earth Karl’s house is set on feels like a violent earthquake for how it bucks under them. The echo of Dream’s punch to the wall echoes out, throughout the room, up into the night air, a distant roar.

Karl remains frozen, his arm outstretched toward Dream, who’s bunched up against the wall, his face so pale his freckles stand out stark on his chin, gasping like he’s run a marathon. He’s completely blue-screened. Dimly, he thinks, _What the heck was that._

They stay like that for an uncomfortably long time, if only because Karl cannot physically process the sudden turn of events and Dream’s nerves are apparently shot to hell from the nightmare. It’s actually five minutes later when Karl manages to pull himself together, compartmentalize, and assess the situation. 

Dream freaking out, check. Sapnap and George sleeping like the fucking dead, check. House undamaged, check. No more tremors, check. Karl pauses and glances around the room, frowns when he doesn’t see what he was looking for. Ignoring the lack of cups in his immediate vicinity, he turns back and gives his full and undivided attention to Dream, whose breathing is finally, mercifully returning to something resembling normalcy. 

“Dude, do you want, like, water or tea or anything?” he whispers, inching around Sapnap to Dream’s side and offering his hand for Dream to hold to ground him. Dream thousand-yard stares back at him, his pallor still sheet-white, and doesn’t say a word, but he does, after a quavering moment, gingerly slide his shaking hand into Karl’s and blow out a long, tremulous breath.

Since he’s holding onto Dream, Karl doesn’t want to leave him alone just yet, even if it’s to get Dream something either to wake him up or let him go back to sleep; instead, he cautiously runs his thumb over Dream’s knuckles, keeps his eyes trained on Dream’s face. He looks awfully young now, golden hair a cloud of bedhead, bottom lip creased from biting it, knees tucked up to his chin. It’s strange to think that for all his accolades and accomplishments, all the crazy things he just pulled off in Championship, Dream’s just barely legal, a child more than an adult, and that he wakes up spooked by nightmares just like anyone else. 

After a few more minutes Karl ducks his head to try to look Dream in the eye and asks in a murmur, “Are you okay? You wanna talk about it? Also, do you want that water?”

Dream’s mouth shifts unsteadily before he whispers back, quiet, hoarse, “Sorry. I’m fine. It was... um.” He worries his lip between his teeth again, a habit of his Karl has noticed; during MCC prep, if he was thinking particularly hard about something, Dream would pace and bite his lip. “I think... I can’t remember it exactly now, but I think it had something to do with, um, fire - a lot of it. Burning alive or something like that.” Karl winces when Dream says that. It sounds horrible; he tells Dream so and the corners of Dream’s lips quirk slightly. “It wasn’t so bad. Like, nothing from real life, you know?” Dream’s hand twitches in Karl’s. “It’s worse if it’s real.”

“I guess so,” Karl acknowledges, glances up to look at the sky; it’s still black as pitch outside, and if Karl were to hazard a guess he’d say it’s around two. He weighs the pros and cons of leaving Dream alone for a bit to get him something to drink because even though Dream said he’s fine he’s really not in Karl’s humble opinion, and after a short internal debate he decides to go for it. He pats Dream’s hand and loosens his grip and whispers as reassuringly as he can, “I’ll go get you some water, ‘kay?”

Dream looks tired again; he crosses his arms over his knees, slumps his head forward onto them, nods slowly. 

Karl quickly extricates himself from the blanket he’d gotten tangled in his feet and pads into the kitchen, the next room over from the living room. He holds it together just long enough to pull out a flask of water from a chest and set it down on his counter, then he sits down heavily at one of the island chairs and puts his head in his hands and whispers “What the fuck” in rapid succession.

That was an earthquake. There’s no way that wasn’t a fucking earthquake, but it was so localized and so short that it couldn’t have been. Dream hit the wall and the ground beneath them shuddered, and Karl may play at being stupid but he’s far from it. Cause and effect. The only logical conclusion Karl can reach is that Dream just made the earth move because he was frightened.

Karl drags his hands over his face. It’s not about being afraid of Dream; he’s never, not once, felt unsafe in his arguably very dangerous friend’s presence. His concern is now whether or not Dream might hurt himself for it. He doesn’t even know if Dream knows he just did that; for all Karl knows Dream’s in the middle of a fucking anime-protagonist oh-god-oh-fuck-I-have-powers awakening. He’s seriously contemplating whether or not he should start babyproofing his house for whenever Dream comes over as he composes himself and shuffles back into the living room with the water.

Dream’s still awake, surprisingly; Karl thought he’d drift off again. He’s finger-combing his hair over his shoulder with placid, deliberate movements, the way someone would pet a cat, gaze fixed off somewhere toward the outside world, his mask gently, ghostly white in the darkness. He doesn’t move a muscle when Karl settles back down beside him. 

“Dream?” asks Karl softly, prides himself on how unflappable he sounds. “Here.” He pulls one of Dream’s hands down to curl around the cup, his own cupped around Dream’s to make sure Dream doesn’t just let it slide out of his hands and spill all over them. Karl doesn’t put it past him, for how distant he seems, but Dream sips quietly at the water until the cup’s empty and sets it down carefully on the floor and returns to staring out the windows.

Karl’s not sure if he’s making the right move here, so he moves very, very slowly just in case Dream doesn’t want him to, but when he tugs Dream’s hair from his grasp and begins to tie it up for him Dream doesn’t say a word, just tilts his head away so Karl can center his bun properly. Karl doesn’t have anything to tie it with when he’s done and whispers so frantically to Dream, who finally huffs out a weary laugh and passes Karl a hair tie. When Karl moves back to admire his own handiwork, Dream shifts to lean against the wall and sighs, his entire body relaxing as he does. Karl studies Dream’s face, tries to read his expression, and comes to the conclusion that Dream has miraculously fallen back asleep as Dream starts to breathe deeply and softly, as people who’re sleeping do. 

Karl leaves Dream propped up against the wall, knowing he’s a light sleeper and not wanting to jostle him accidentally by trying to lay him down, and returns to his end of the blanket nest. After a moment of deliberation he curls up beside Sapnap without an ounce of shame, wanting the physical closeness with his friend after the pretty harrowing night. As sleep edges in on his mind, he thinks of Dream, who he’s afraid might hurt himself one day terraforming or whatever it is he does; Dream, who might not even know he can do things like that; Dream, who Karl thinks he’ll side with every time.

And when he wakes up in the afternoon to the smell of pancakes, and Sapnap has somehow maneuvered them around in his sleep so that Karl has inexplicably become the big spoon, and George is lying faceup on two of Karl’s crafting tables looking like he’s contemplating death, and Dream glides in with four steaming plates and a cheery grin on his face, Karl _knows_ he’ll side with Dream every time.

(It’s only partly because of the pancakes, which are very good.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yo can i talk about how open the current gen of mcyters are with their affection. i love them for it. dream smp characters canonically being in unconventional/platonic relationships pog?? and the sapnap and quackity and karl polyam relationship is just chef’s kiss. immaculate. finally some good fucking food 
> 
> anyway all this to say the fuchsia frankensteins “kiss” still haunts me at night and it ended up not even making it into this chapter
> 
> fun ideas i had about the mcc afterparty that also didn’t make it into this chapter:
> 
> \- it’s not really a formal event it’s more like some kind of school dance afterparty where everyone puts on sweats and eats junk food and plays party games  
> \- there used to be alcoholic drinks but after an incident during an afterparty wherein a few minors (cough tommy and sapnap cough) accidentally got drunk noxcrew stopped serving alcoholic drinks because they couldn’t trust the minors or the adults in championship lmao  
> \- landlord asked dream to dance during the mcc 11 afterparty and they just stared dead-on into each others’ faces the entire time  
> \- techno and dream were talking about ace race during their dance  
> \- lauren commissioned the cake and after everyone had eaten she threw landlord into it for blowing up parkour warrior  
> \- george got stuck between puffy and tommy in the conga line and got teased for the entire ten minutes the conga line lasted  
> \- wilbur requested bruno mars’s that’s what i like to the dj as people started to dance and tommy fly-tackled him into a bowl of punch and they both got yelled at by phil as techno laughed his ass off in the background  
> \- after he finished spinning dream in his arms, fundy set dream down gallantly into a chair. after he finished spinning karl in his arms, sapnap dumped karl into quackity’s lap and the folding chair they were sat on collapsed


	12. hbomb (a maid's burden)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> maid hbomb lives in my head rent free, folks. every time i watch that video i lose my mind a little
> 
> same thing applies as with ant’s chapter please pretend hbomb joined dream smp earlier than he actually did please the timing’s fucked unless you indulge me thank many much

HBomb is known for many things. He’s a three-time Championship winner and a six-time finalist and a renowned fighter with an aim that could make fucking Robin Hood cry. He can hit a moving target from three chunks away. He’s slain an Ender Dragon. 

However, if HBomb plays his cards right, this may be his crowning achievement. 

“I want to dress up as a maid for Fundy,” he says, conjuring up as much bravado as he can muster. He’s in full netherite and armed with a sword and bow, there’s absolutely no reason he should feel as much cold sweat dripping down his face as he does. 

Fundy’s fiancé leans against the tree he was cutting and levels such an impassive look at HBomb that he has severe second thoughts. Did he misread Fundy and Dream’s relationship? He’d thought it was a bit or a platonic marriage. Or is it the maid part that’s throwing Dream off? To be fair, it is kind of weird, but god, imagine the _look_ on Fundy’s face -

“I can get you a wig,” Dream says without a single change in facial expression. HBomb’s unspoken justifications screech to a halt. 

“I - okay?” he asks, confused. 

“Okay,” says Dream, apparently satisfied, turning back to the tree and taking it down in a few swings. It’s both impressive and also incredibly threatening. 

“Uh, I meant, like, today.” HBomb can’t plan ahead at all, it’s a fatal flaw of his. “I may or may not have planned this for tomorrow.”

A grin rises to Dream’s face now, quick and easy. “Fundy did the same thing when he asked me on a date,” he explains fondly, running the blade of his axe between his fingers to check for nicks. “He didn’t even have the movie ready when he asked me, he stayed up all night trying to code it and booked out an entire restaurant instead of just a table by accident, it was great.”

“That’s cute,” HBomb offers, unsure.

“It is,” Dream agrees amicably, then pushes off from the tree and cricks his neck, slings his axe over his shoulder. “Alright, so, you have, like, twenty hours or so to put this thing together, right?”

HBomb checks his wrist, realizes he doesn’t have a watch, and squints up at the sky to pinpoint the position of the sun. It looks just after noon, so, “Yeah, just about.”

“Cool, I can work with that.” Dream sets off for the nearby expanse of forest, leaving the main street entirely, and HBomb trots after him, feeling not unlike a tagalong on his own mission to become another man’s maid. “What else do you need?”

HBomb had sketched out his outfit beforehand somewhere, conjures up his schematics now. “A wig,” he says, counting off on his fingers. “A dress, cat ears and a cat tail?” Dream snorts into his hand. “Oh, come on, it’ll be funny. And then just makeup, I guess. Niki could probably help me.”

“If she doesn’t laugh at you,” Dream says, stopping them just outside of the treeline in front of a massive clearing and rolling hills. He crouches and runs his hand through the grass at his feet while HBomb pokes around the edges of the clearing, and straightens with a grin when HBomb gives in and asks what they’re doing there.

“You got shears, H?” he asks, planting the axe in front of him and leaning his weight onto it, expectant, his gaze trained on the hill before them. 

HBomb checks his pockets, crows in triumph when he finds shears in his back pocket, and holds them up questioningly at Dream, who grins wider and nods toward the crest of the hill.

The ground honest-to-god begins to tremble.

“What the fuck,” says HBomb, peering at the hill. As if waiting for him to scrutinize, white woolly bodies begin to stampede over it. HBomb feels his mouth drop open. _“What the fuck.”_

“Oh hey, will you look at that,” says Dream, voice completely even, as HBomb screams, disappearing under the charging flock of wild sheep.

It takes several minutes for Dream to stop crying with laughter, and several more minutes for him to locate and dig HBomb out from where he was being _fucking buried alive in wool, dipshit, stop laughing!_ When HBomb finally surfaces, he marvels at the sheep around him, the luxury of having air to breathe allowing him to observe the dozens of white and pale-blue ovines that had attempted to brutally murder him just a few seconds before.

“Wow,” he manages, unable to really articulate any other feeling other than amazement. He turns to look at Dream, holding his arms up to keep from accidentally incurring the sheep’s wrath, and says, “This is... a lot of sheep.”

Dream’s mouth is wobbling dangerously again, and HBomb points at him with a stern, “Don’t you fucking dare start again or we’ll never make it out of this alive,” then looms over a sheep right in front of him - it’s orchid-blue, and stares up at him with a look of naïve curiosity in its big black eyes - and says as reassuringly as he can while wielding what amounts to very sharp and very big scissors, “Don’t worry, I’ve done this before, I won’t hurt you.”

“Have you actually?”

“Dream, please, if they figure out the methods I used to get wool before, I’ll get mobbed.”

HBomb does manage to shear off a generous pile of wool from the flock before they all prance away, spooked either by his loudness or Dream standing up and waving his axe around like the animal he is. Yes, it was weird, but HBomb isn’t exactly one to look a gift horse in the mouth. He’s been around long enough to know when good luck shouldn’t be questioned. He forces Dream to carry half the wool back to Eret’s castle with him, because Dream agreed to help out and should have known he’d be used as a packhorse for the rest of the day, not that Dream looks too off-put by it. Eret greets them both at the gates, listens to the parameters of HBomb’s quest with a far-too-serious expression on their face, and tells HBomb with a wink that they can sew something together for him free of charge. That frees up the problem of HBomb not trusting himself with any pointy things smaller than a sword, and he gives the laughing Eret a big kiss on the cheek for it while Dream pokes at the heap of wool they’ve dumped on Eret’s grounds. 

“So,” says HBomb conversationally, once they’ve left the palatial grounds. “Cat ears.”

“And a cat tail,” adds Dream. When HBomb glares at him, Dream smirks. “Dude, if you’re doing this for my fiancé, you might as well go whole hog.”

“Most people would have kicked my ass for suggesting this, y’know,” grumbles HBomb, affecting annoyance. 

Dream, despite his amazing emotional gullibility, sees right through it. “My world isn’t most people,” he says cheerily, and HBomb shoots a look at him when he says so, because he heard the thread of pride in Dream’s voice loud and clear. It makes HBomb feel a coil of pride inside, too - proud to be one of Dream’s friends, someone Dream trusts enough to let him into this little oasis where all these people that have learned to love each other can explore and create and wreak havoc as much as they like. 

HBomb clears his throat to shake off the sudden onset of the warm and fuzzies. “Well, here’s the thing - killing ocelots is off the table,” he says. 

Dream side-eyes him. “I can’t believe killing ocelots was ever on the table at all for you,” he replies, disappointment dripping from his words.

“Don’t put words into my mouth, man, it was never on the table to begin with.” An idea occurs to HBomb, and he feels a wicked smile spread over his face. He wiggles his fingers at Dream and coos, “You wanna do your little Disney princess summoning thing again?”

Because it was perfect timing, earlier, when Dream had patted the ground and the sheep came running. Sure, Dream doesn’t have any control over things like that, but HBomb has seen his manhunts - knows that dolphins fucking love Dream for no particular reason, knows Dream adores animals. The Disney princess joke came up once during an MCC afterparty and then stuck, and now it’s a running punchline for any post-MCC 6 participant - Dream beats you, you call him a Disney princess, he preens and begins to sing off-key. 

HBomb knows the bit, and is fully prepared for Dream to burst into terrible, high-pitched song and dance around him. He’s got his fingers stuffed in his ears and everything. 

This time, though, Dream pauses. He eyes HBomb significantly, and it looks like he’s considering. HBomb can barely make out what he’s saying through his makeshift earplugs, but he’s not a bad lip-reader, and he clearly sees Dream’s lips form the words, “H, you wanna see something cool?”

HBomb watches warily as Dream drops into a crouch and knocks on the wooden planks of the street, showily, three raps right in the center.

As if on cue, the ground begins to rumble.

HBomb gets out about three words of “Dream, what the - ” before he is once again overrun by a sea of light-gray sheep as Dream collapses into laughter. 

The whole situation is so completely and utterly bizarre that HBomb consciously ejects it from his mind all day until he finally goes back home later in the evening, a mass of light gray wool in his arms and a bit sunburnt. Eret chuckles when they see him and points out the maid outfit they’ve left out to dry (“Eret, you’re a treasure,” HBomb tells them fervently), and while they make him make his own dinner, they sit down with him and the two talk while he scarfs down his food. 

The whole sheep-summoning schtick comes back to HBomb as he finishes off his last steak, and he pauses as he stares down at his plate. He’d mull over it by himself, but Eret’s been part of Dream’s world longer than he has, and where HBomb has specialized in combat, Eret’s much more the studious type, a mythology nerd if he’s ever seen one. He bites at his thumbnail before deciding to go ahead and ask.

“Eret,” he says, cautious, “have you ever read about a thing where... where someone can, like, control animals?”

Eret’s eyes may be obscured by their sunglasses but their gaze is keen. “Control,” they repeat thoughtfully, leaning forward onto their elbows. “Well, not necessarily _control_. I’ve read of instances where people can prompt animals to do things, or where people shift into animals. You might have to be more specific.”

“It’s the former, I’m pretty sure.” 

“Okay.” Eret taps their chin. “If it’s that kind of animal control, on a larger scale, I think I’ve only read of gods doing that sort of thing. Evokers can do a pared-down version of it, but they can only summon vexes. Um... there are, of course, differences between gods. You know. Minor gods can only create worlds, and can only affect things within worlds they create, whereas old gods have everything at their fingertips.”

HBomb thinks he might pass out. “Right.”

Eret raises their eyebrows at him, careful, courteous. “H... You don’t have to answer, but can I ask why you’re curious?”

And HBomb cares about Dream a lot. Damn it, Dream invited him to his own paradise of sorts, trusts him implicitly, why else would he have done crazy shit like this in front of him, the kind of thing that gives him away? HBomb trusts him too, likes the stupid kid, has liked him ever since he saw that first manhunt and he smoked everyone in Parkour Warrior and held out his hand very shyly and asked if HBomb would like to join the Dream SMP. HBomb feels a lurch in his chest, unbearably fond, unbearably tight, and he thinks he almost cries.

“Sorry, Eret,” he answers hoarsely, looking anywhere but Eret’s kind eyes, settling instead on the maid dress in hopes that it distracts him from his revelation. It does, a little bit; brings a hilarity to the situation that wasn’t there before, makes him get excited again for the white hairs he’s going to give Fundy tomorrow, and the smile that he plasters on his face is only slightly forced as he continues brightly, “I’m going to sew the cat ears and tail by myself, though! Just watch. You can help me practice the dirty jokes and everything.”

Eret doesn’t push, tactful as always. They grin back and say, “Fundy’ll have a fit.”

“That’s what I’m aiming for, baby.”

HBomb sleeps fitfully, in spite of his finished costume lying in the corner of his room like a guardian from hell, but in the morning Eret tosses him a soft, curly thing that they say “came from Dream, he stopped by earlier, he said it’s your wig.” HBomb holds the wig in his hands and thinks, apropos of nothing, of the fucking Golden Fleece myth that Techno once recited in full on a table at an MCC afterparty after consuming enough energy drinks to put a small child into a coma. Staring down at the brown ringlets, like it’s some divine ordination, proof of someone’s royalty, he sets his jaw and closes his eyes and promises to the air, _I’m not betraying your trust, I’m not giving your secrets out - thanks thanks thanks for letting me be here, letting me into your world._

Later, after he’s done tormenting Fundy, HBomb passes Dream on his way back to the castle. Dream has to sit down because he wheezes so hard, and his face is entirely free of burden, and HBomb can feel that traitorous tightness in his chest again, a promise. 

He thinks Dream knows, because Dream hugs him something fierce before he lets HBomb go.

And somewhere far off, a revolution is planted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the subtitle could have been something like “kaichou wa maid-sama” or some shit like that but my best friend’s huge brain pulled through once again so here we are
> 
> i loved the afterparty thing so much that it’s referenced thrice in this chapter hhh please your honor they’re all love one another
> 
> okay but i swear on my life this chapter was just supposed to be funny but it got ominous toward the end. i promise this was just meant to be fluff. why am i like this.


	13. alyssa (ship in a bottle)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alyssa is leaving, at least temporarily.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we’ve arrived! welcome to the latter half of you’re human tonight. i’ve hyped it up for a fair while, so i hope you guys enjoy! 
> 
> i was very excited about this so uh. double update again ^^;;

Alyssa is stowing the last of her diamond armor away when she hears her door open and close. She’s on edge as is, what with how gray the sky is and how the sound of blades clashing seems to greet her at every moment; she throws on her diamond chestplate and grabs the iron axe she had laying beside her and whirls around, her back pressed to the ender chest, glaring at the entryway with her weapon in front of her.

It’s just Dream, free of armor, his arms held where she can see them, line of his mouth uncertain. Alyssa immediately sets down her axe, opens her mouth to apologize, but Dream jerks his head no and she can’t bear to see the look on his face when he tries to meet her eyes so she averts her gaze to her carpeted floor, flexing her hands.

They stay suspended in silence like that for a minute or two. Alyssa doesn’t want to start this conversation. Even though it’s been a long time coming, she can’t bring herself to be the bearer of bad news, can’t look at Dream and tell him what he already knows, can’t run away.

But she can. Of course she can. Callahan has already taken his leave, silent, firm; her best friend hadn’t signed a word, but then, she’d never needed him to. Callahan and Alyssa have never been completely reliant on each other the way Skeppy and Bad or Tubbo and Tommy (but she won’t think of Tubbo and Tommy) are, and they’re fully capable of making decisions independent of one another, but - it’s Callahan. They’ve been friends for nearly two decades and Alyssa would murder for him. His disappearance said everything that needed to be said: she is fully capable of running away from this if she chooses.

The thought of Callahan is what prods Alyssa into looking back up. She almost loses her nerve again, looking at Dream, another old friend who wanted to give her a place to live since the original eight of them had come from smaller survival worlds, Sam, Sapnap, George, and Dream from hardcores and Alyssa, Ponk, Bad, and Callahan from normals and peacefuls. Her first, fuzzy memories of them at six all are gentle and whimsical and don’t hurt a bit: Sam, tall even then at ten, green-haired and smiley and smart; Bad, the eldest and therefore the designated caretaker, watching his language and making sure they all had enough to eat; Ponk, learning to hunt beside Bad, learning caution about his face from Sam; George, the fastest to tears among them but the lightest-fingered in a busy world like Hypixel; Callahan, unspeaking but keenly articulate, who taught Alyssa how to listen; Sapnap, pyromanic since the beginning, begging for piggy back rides often and almost always getting them; Dream, masked even in Alyssa’s earliest memories, freckled, fair, mischievous, teaching himself to stay ten steps ahead of everyone else in the room; Alyssa herself, scrawny, passionate, who knocked out someone’s teeth once when they made fun of Callahan for his muteness, who learned potions from Sam and poisonous animals from Bad, combat from her friends, kindness over time. 

She takes a deep breath and holds it for a few seconds to steel herself, and lets the words she’s kept bottled up somewhere deep inside her escape with the exhale: “I’m leaving, Dream.”

Dream doesn’t flinch at all. Alyssa thinks it’s worse that he doesn’t. He just ducks his head quickly in acknowledgement, frames his mask in his hands for a moment. When he speaks, he doesn’t sound dismissive or upset, just soft. “Okay. Am I allowed to ask why?”

Alyssa almost snubs the request, catches herself at the last second. Reminds herself to remember who’s her enemy and who’s her friend, tries to ignore the fact that the line’s getting blurrier and blurrier. She hedges, “Well...”

“I just,” says Dream, abruptly, like he was weighing the words in his mouth and hadn’t actually intended to spit them out. His jaw works without sound, and his gaze shoots to the wall off to the side, where Alyssa used to keep a floor-to-ceiling painting that’s been taken down. After a moment, he finishes, “Sorry. I just thought... in case other people were going to leave...”

Damn Alyssa for melting like butter as soon as her childhood friend pulls out the “I-have-abandonment-issues” card. It’s not Dream’s fault; he doesn’t prey on them any more than they prey on him. Alyssa does wish, though, that her walls weren’t so quick to tumble down when it comes to her friends. _“Dream_ \- god. I...” Alyssa curls her fingers around the edge of the ender chest behind her til her knuckles creak, trying to summon up the strength she knows is simmering away somewhere, and maybe that’s why her words scorch when she says, fast, “It’s getting dangerous in your world, Dream.”

_That_ makes Dream recoil. Something cracks open in his expression and all of a sudden it’s like they’re eleven again and Dream has staggered home with his face stark white against the freckles and the blood as he whispers “It hurts hurts _hurts,”_ and that night they all slept crammed into two beds pushed together, and Alyssa had scrubbed Dream’s tears away from the edges of his mask and swore she’d never be the person who made Dream feel like that. It’s that promise, coming back to her, chiding her, and she immediately reaches for his face, pleading, “Dream, Dream, don’t. Please don’t run from me.”

“That’s what _you’re_ doing, Alyssa,” Dream snips back immediately, then cringes, his expression twisting even as Alyssa feels her hackles rise. “Sorry, I’m sorry, that was mean. But you _are_ leaving. For sure.”

“For sure,” Alyssa echoes, relenting and returning to leaning against the ender chest, repentant for the delivery but not the content of her words. She’s thought about it for weeks, now, ever since those stupid discs became a point of contention and then the whole “drug” van disaster and now the silly little skirmishes that are becoming less and less silly and little. Alyssa hasn’t left her house for days, fearing for the lives of her pets and her few treasured possessions. She’s not wrong, it’s getting dangerous; she just wishes she weren’t the one delivering what feels more and more like a death sentence. 

Dream makes a noise like he’s been stepped on, knots his fingers together, nods to himself as though coming to a decision. He moves away from the wall opposite her, approaches carefully as though she were a wounded animal, and holds out his hands expectantly.

“Dream?” asks Alyssa, a bit wary.

Dream throws her a hurt look that’s only a tiny bit genuinely wounded. “Lyss, just let me hold your hands for a bit?” His voice loses its confidence for a single second, fails in the middle of his sentence. “If I’m right, you won’t be around for a while, so, just. Just until you decide to go.”

Alyssa feels her throat close up, all her limbs lock; it’s a miracle she manages to place her hands in Dream’s and hold on tight, press her forehead to Dream’s and try to send him all the things she can’t possibly say that way: _You’re one of my closest friends_ and _I’m sorry I’m not brave enough to stay_ and _How did things end up like this_ and _I was going to leave no matter what but I wish so bad it wasn’t going to hurt you._

It takes a full hour of them sitting like that for Alyssa to finally feel like she’s ready. She’s got the crystal humming away in her pack, signal set to a bigger world with a lot of people, a factions server on peaceful, and when she pulls it out Dream sighs, quiet, knowing. 

“Safe journey, Alyssa,” he says, dropping his hands so they brush the floor, and Alyssa can feel tears climb up her throat, almost choke her. 

“Be safe, Dream,” she tells him, stern, and she gets one last glimpse of Dream’s quicksilver smile, his fingers twitching on the floor of her house, before she leans backward into her new home for the foreseeable future. 

It’s alright. The land itself is vast, if boring, with a reliable rotation of four different biomes every set amount of chunks. The people are genial, if distant; most already know each other, have formed family units long before she arrived, and they’re friendly enough but unwilling to welcome a stranger into their ranks. It’s none of Alyssa’s concern, since she manages to locate Callahan three days in and they stick together like glue from then on. 

Both of them ignore the elephant in the room with relative ease. Their situation is domestic and cozy enough if they don’t think too hard about it and they carve out their own niche in this weirdly homey yet unfamiliar world and live it for two full months. 

Eventually word of their home’s fate filters through. Callahan’s face darkens when he hears; signs fiercely to Alyssa, _I can’t just sit by and wait for the other shoe to drop,_ and she’s not surprised when she comes back to their base one day and he’s gone again.

Alyssa holds out, partly out of patience and partly because she’s afraid of what awaits her should she go back. The fact that there’s no word from Callahan isn’t what alarms her, since they don’t really need to communicate to know what the other’s thinking; it’s the sudden radio silence of Dream, who drops out completely from the public eye for the first time since he officially entered it the year before. 

At the end of that week, late in the night of October 16th, Alyssa gets a message from the Dream SMP that makes her blood freeze in her veins. She doesn’t bother to pack the resources she and Callahan gathered for weeks on end, doesn’t even stop to rifle through her things; she dons her armor and grabs her axe and watches her hand shake like a leaf as she pinpoints her home world on the crystal. 

She hits the ground running. Panic is the only thing that registers, forcing her legs to move as quickly as they’ll carry her; she’s got potions and gapples in her house still, unless someone robbed her after she left, which is likely, but it doesn’t hurt to hold out hope. She turns the corner just by her house without looking and does a double-take when she walks in. 

Her house is completely untouched. _Completely_. From the thin film of dust blanketing the highest shelves in her sitting room to the slight disturbance in her bright blue carpet where she’d seen Dream’s hands rest as she left are all exactly as they were two months ago. Alyssa wastes a few precious seconds gaping at her house, because it’s like it’s been transported through time or something, perfectly preserved as is for when she returns. 

Like someone was waiting for her to come home. 

Alyssa shakes it off and snatches up as many regen and healing pots as she can carry and takes off.

(Only later, crying into Callahan’s shoulder, she’ll conjure up an image of Dream kneeling in her empty house, protecting it, bubbling it for the day she comes back. He expected her to come back. He knew she would. 

She doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i decided not to write a callahan chapter when i first started writing this fic because i didn’t know enough about him to do his character justice, which i do still stand by, but i think he deserves recognition nonetheless, so this chapter can honestly be taken as a joint alyssa and callahan chapter with a heavier focus on alyssa. 
> 
> nicknames fucking kill me. nicknames are my kryptonite. the headcanon of shortening alyssa to lyss is my magnum fucking opus
> 
> also ooh some tastey forbidden lore except not really because there’s very little context and understanding since alyssa was a toddler. trust me, it’ll all come together at the end :)


	14. niki (life doesn't discriminate)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wilbur and Tommy are relentless, they waste no time; Niki is willing to wait for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so much has happened in the past three months that we’ve all forgotten where it started: hamilton roleplay

People don’t think of Niki first when they think of the small faction of people calling themselves L’Manberg. It’s always Wilbur or Tommy, the ones who throw themselves headfirst into conflict, the firebrand faces of the revolution, Wilbur with his silver tongue and Tommy with his spitfire temper. Niki doesn’t resent it. She prefers it that way. Will told her at the very beginning, didn’t he: pulled her aside and thanked her, heartfelt, for choosing to side with them, and said if Aaron Burr were on Hamilton’s side that’s what she’d be in L’Manberg’s history. It was funny at the time and they’d both laughed about it. 

It’s not funny anymore. Wilbur was right. 

Niki’s known Wilbur and his family for a long time, long enough to read between the lines. She knows for all their spontaneous bursting into song and jokes about drug peddling and drafting of expletive-filled declarations that they’re serious about it. That all this - L’Manberg, independence, Will’s knuckles white on a bow - means something to them, and that means it means something to Niki, too. 

And the thing is, even though they’re serious about it, Niki thinks they don’t quite grasp the gravity of the whole situation. Wilbur, at least, has the advantage of age; his face has grown steely, his carriage more stern, and because he’s the self-proclaimed leader of the rebellion he does try to keep things as bloodless as he can. Tommy’s operating on an entirely different playing field; as much as he cares, this is still little more than another war game to him, just with higher stakes, something that’s dangerously addictive for someone as willing as him to gamble on high odds. It’s not that Niki thinks Tommy will back out at a crucial moment because to him, it’s just a contest. No, she thinks he’s going to throw himself into something he can’t take back and regret it.

Like this. Like right now. Like the gauntlet Tommy throws down with no input from his eldest brother, grey-faced beside him; like Dream, expression deadly unreadable, watching Tommy sign his life away. 

Fundy’s right next to her losing his mind, so Niki feigns shock as well, covering her hand with her mouth and gasping dramatically, but in all honesty, she’s not surprised at all. Maybe it’s callous of her to dissect the situation so incisively, but it was only a matter of time until Tommy did something abjectly foolish in order to make some sort of impression. It’s written all over his face: the dawning realization that no one else is cheering, that no one else is looking forward to the duel, that this is really independence or death. Tommy’s never been good at hiding how he feels. 

It’s a good thing Dream turns on his heel and troops away with the rest of the unofficial Dream SMP members when he does, because as soon as he clears the hill and disappears from view, Tommy whirls and grabs Wilbur’s military coat by the lapels and demands, “What the fuck did you just stand there for? Right-hand man, Wilbur - you need to back me up when I make statements like that!” His hands are shaking on the deep blue coat. Tommy may bite but he’s mostly bark, having always covered for his inexistent poker face by drowning out his emotions with rage; Niki knows the shouting is bluster at best.

Wilbur, to his credit, doesn’t bite back. His voice is cool as iron as he lifts Tommy’s hands from his coat: “I said that as long as he was willing and you were willing I’d let it happen. Isn’t that good enough, Tommy?”

“No, it’s fucking not! That isn’t really a shining vote of confidence, Will!” 

“Tommy, I don’t know how it didn’t get through your thick skull earlier, but _you’re worth more than L’Manberg.”_ Wilbur has pitched his voice low. Niki can only hear them because she’s closest; Fundy has already retreated, probably to lick his wounds over his fiancé’s place in the war, and Tubbo’s taken a few tactful steps back. She shouldn’t be eavesdropping, but, well. She would have heard it all eventually from Wilbur. He continues, placidly furious, “You’re my right hand and my fucking _brother_ , and you’re about to throw your life away for what? A whim? Something that got blown out of proportion?”

Tommy scowls back. “This means so much to us,” he grits out, shoving away from Wilbur. His tricorne comes tumbling down the ground sadly; Niki bends to pick it up and pats some strands of grass away. “L’Manberg is everything we’ve got now, don’t you see? Wilbur - I’m dead serious, I’m going to fucking do it, with or without you there.” He squares his shoulders, tips his chin high, proud and unyielding and blazing as always. His voice doesn’t even shake when he says bravely, “And it’s just respawn. I’ve done it loads of times, haven’t I, Tubbo?”

“I didn’t hear anything you just said other than ‘haven’t I, Tubbo’, but I’m going to assume the correct answer is yes,” chirps Tubbo. Tommy cheers and throws his arm over Tubbo’s shoulder and the two go traipsing off back toward L’Manberg’s black-and-yellow walls, the sunset washing over them all red and gold, looking for all the world like two kids having fun, no bloodshed, no danger.

Wilbur stays staring at the ground where Tommy had been standing for a moment. Niki brushes away imaginary dust from Tommy’s tricorne and puts it into Wilbur’s hands and squeezes one in her own when he looks at her with eyes that are nearly bottomless. 

“Niki,” he says hoarsely, “do you remember when Dream and I had that date at your bakery?”

“Yes,” she replies immediately. Carefully, she adds on, “I thought it didn’t go well?”

“No, no, it did. Well, it went... relatively well, all things considered, even though we never really went on a second.” There’s a worn hole on one side of the tricorne’s brim; Wilbur wears it down even more with his thumb as he talks. “But the thing is, Niki, when we were leaving, Dream promised - sorry, it’s kind of a long story how we got the conversation to that point - but he promised he’d keep an eye out for Tommy. Keep him safe.” And Wilbur’s face goes stormy, his grip on the tricorne going tight; he says, choked, “This is the fucking opposite of keeping him safe.”

The wispy beginnings of a plan had already been formulating in Niki’s mind, ever since Dream agreed to speak with Wilbur and Tommy, but Wilbur’s terror solidifies it. He once called her his Aaron Burr; she’s about to take her shot.

Dinner that night is subdued. Tommy and Tubbo are as lively as ever but Fundy picks at his food and Wilbur’s manner is strained and it’s a small relief to Niki when she excuses herself early and pretends to turn in for the night. Instead, she goes through the communal ender chest, finds the netherite armor Wilbur gifted her a season or so ago, digs up a diamond sword, and heads out into the night.

Part of the problem, in her humble opinion, is the boys and their silly honor codes. They’re so obsessed with making sure everything is fair and square and are astounded when people don’t play their games the same way. They learned that lesson earlier in the day with Eret, didn’t they - never even imagined there could be a turncoat amongst them. Sure, Niki didn’t expect it, either, but she also knew right away that if the opposite side was planting traitors that meant all bets were off, and Niki isn’t one of Phil’s children, raised on righteousness and fair play; she’s hardcore-born and has few qualms about taking the battle to the opponent.

Niki is only gentle because she knows what it’s like to be cruel.

It’s easy work to enter Dream SMP lands. Niki’s not entirely sure where Dream lives but it ends up not mattering because she spots him going off alone into a small cave two chunks or so off of the main road that’s stocked with weapons. It’s probably where his fellows keep their extras. She can loot it when she’s done.

Dream’s in partial armor, just boots and a chestplate, and while he does have his axe, his crossbow and shield are nowhere to be seen. He’s in home territory, after all; his guard’s completely down as he kneels before the crafting bench in the cave, illuminated vaguely by the few torches. 

If he’d been just a bit more prepared for ambush, he could’ve fended Niki off easily; she's never been good at combat. He wasn’t, though, and it shows when Niki darts out of the bushes. He spins almost instantly and catches sight of her - even without prior knowledge, his instincts are wickedly sharp - but Niki clearly has the upper hand with her surprise attack and he lost his balance earlier, and Niki uses it to her advantage. Dream deflects her first blow with his axe, but the weight distribution is awkward between them and the axe rebounds further away than Dream probably expected, and by the time he draws it up again Niki has her sword to his neck.

“Drop it,” she tells him, low, fierce. He does so without question.

Now that the initial hit of adrenaline has worn off, all Niki can feel is the burgeoning fear, the rage bubbling up like potion over the lip of a flask. She tamped it down solidly for Tommy’s sake and for Will’s sake, sitting at the dinner table like nothing was wrong, but here, so close to cutting their established enemy’s throat, she can’t help the acidity with which she demands, “Call it off.”

“What?” whispers Dream delicately. His throat bobs slightly against the edge of the blade; blood beads up. Niki ignores it as best she can.

“You know what,” she hisses. “Call off the duel, Dream. Let us have our independence. It’s not a game to us, understand? Or - ” she hates threatening people, hates making others feel small, but at this point her resentment toward Dream outweighs any reservations she has about it, “ - I’ll hunt you down. Respawn means just as little to me as Tommy and Wilbur and Tubbo and Fundy apparently mean to you. You - ” she falters, just briefly, but picks it back up quickly, “ - you won’t know safety until you let us live!”

Niki’s breathing hard by the end of her spiel. She’d inadvertently put more pressure on her sword, too, apparently; when she hazards a look up Dream’s bleeding in earnest now, a steady rivulet of crimson running down his neck, soaking his undershirt and staining the pale green and white of his hoodie. She’s angry enough that it doesn’t matter to her. All she can see is a demon in sheep’s skin, someone toying with her friends regarding something they built with their bare hands and that he now wants to demolish like a house of cards; how dare he? How could he, after inviting them first, after offering them friendship, after being on their side?

“Do we mean _nothing_ to you?” she asks despairingly, unbidden. “You - you - !”

Dream’s hands are on hers in a flash, accompanied by his soft, heartsick “Niki.” She curses herself for not restraining him and braces for her wrist to get broken or something but all he does is sigh deeply, his fingers light on her hand, and somehow the bubbling, seething hatred that had sprouted, mutated, from her protectiveness wilts. Its barbed leaves go drifting away and Niki swallows hard and all the ugly emotions that had been clawing their way up her throat and on the tip of her tongue in a churning, anguished mess dies down. She hadn’t noticed how hard she’d been shaking until she stopped. The roaring in her ears, urging her on, has subsided; she feels clearer.

“Niki...” says Dream, uncertain, faint, and Niki doesn’t move her sword away because for all that she’s calmed down he’s still dangerous, but when Niki looks at Dream now, all she can see is... her friend. Her friend, pale and shaky and bleeding down his front; her friend, just three years older than her and five than Tommy, playing along with the youngest of the server for whom he’s always had a noticeable soft spot; her friend, who didn’t notice how serious it got until it was too late, who’d gotten too cocky, who’d gotten too competitive. 

It occurs to Niki for the first time: Dream, for all that’s he’s the head of the opposing power and the world owner, is just as in over his head as she is. 

“I’m going to talk,” she says firmly, keeping her sword exactly where it is, if with less pressure. Talking aloud has always helped her process things, a habit that Tubbo picked up from her at some point. “Please don’t interrupt me.”

Dream doesn’t say a word. 

“I... I respect you,” Niki begins, trying to find the right words. “I do. For the Pet War. For apologizing first. I think it would have been easy for you to fight over it. It was your pets on the line too.” Beckerson and Mars, both technically faultless. Niki’s glad she and Tommy didn’t kill them, because it would have been empty vengeance, and all Niki had wanted was an apology. “It was very big of you to let it go. To not let the war get any bigger than it already was. Well, until Fundy woke up. I respect that.”

Dream nods very slightly. His attention is fully on Niki, letting her unravel her thoughts uninterrupted, and she respects that, too: that he’s showing someone who could slit his throat that much basic decency. 

“I think,” Niki says, hesitates. Looks at Dream, then at the sword in her hands, wondering if the growing rage she’d felt earlier will resurface if she thinks about it hard enough. There’s no anxiety or animosity, though, just a calm levelheadedness that she’d consciously thrown out the window with her misgivings about this whole endeavor. 

And, well. Maybe Niki is soft, unbefitting of the hardcore world she came from. But she likes that about herself, that she’s always the first to forgive, the first to relent. She may have grown up cruel but she infinitely prefers to be kind.

“I think I was foolish,” she acquiesces, lowering her blade, “for expecting you to act exactly as you did then. That’s not how people work. You let the Pet War go, but you won’t let go of L’Manberg. Is that right?”

Dream stays where he is, rammed up against the crafting table, his weight leaned onto it, enough blood dyeing his clothing to make it look somewhat alarming. “...Yes.”

Niki doesn’t say more. She looks her friend up and down and considers the new possibility that she doesn’t know her friend nearly as well as she thought she did, if she predicted that he would have the same response toward L’Manbergian independence as he did the murder of several pets. It’s human to adapt. It’s human to learn.

Niki leaves after that, trying to sweep the guilt niggling in her gut away. She got what she wanted - proof of Dream’s humanity - even if it’s not in the form she wanted it. Deep down, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to stop the duel, even if it was for Will’s peace of mind, but she’d wondered if she could see a glimpse into Dream’s thought process, if she could tell that there was still someone who cared under the porcelain mask instead of it being all cold ruthless tyrant.

Wilbur catches her when she returns to L’Manberg with blood on her sword and tears in her eyes. He doesn’t say anything, not even to rebuke her; just lets her cry all over his overcoat and stops her when she tries to apologize for it, knee-jerk. Her horribly noble best friend, who she should be comforting instead of the other way round.

When Dream shoots Tommy the next morning, a clean shot straight through the heart that turns Tommy to dust in the space of a breath, Niki isn’t looking at Eret, who’s trying to catch Wilbur’s eye and communicate remorse. She’s not looking at George and Sapnap, who both look away when they see Dream nock his arrow, nor Fundy, who’s looking at Dream with something approaching desperation in his eyes, nor Tubbo, who cries out like his heart is being stomped to pieces when he sees Tommy die. She’s not even looking at Wilbur beside her, staggering back when the arrow hits true, eyes huge and glassy under his tricorne.

Her eyes are on the thin, jagged cut healing red and pink on Dream’s throat, uncovered by bandages, proof that Dream cares, even as he temporarily kills her best friend’s baby brother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> niki nihachu the power player!!!!!! we love to see it we love to see her she is the undisputed queen she can have my whole heart i didn’t need it anyway. 
> 
> this chapter was honestly so fun to write even though it kind of got away from me hh


	15. eret (crown of thorns)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The king in name only consults with the true leader.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: description of panic attack. if you want to skip the panic attack, skip when you read “‘Oh,’ they say, ‘oh, no’” all the way to “and all of a sudden, just as unexpected as before”.
> 
> it’s Them. the king of dream smp and my heart alongside niki and dream and fundy and tommy and - ((gets sniped))
> 
> before i forget!! this fic and any fic i ever write isn't going to bash any ccs because frankly that's sick. if i gave any impression that this fic is a hate fic on any creator at all i am so sorry, and that's not my intention. i love the mcyters i write about, that's why i write about them.

Something feels like it’s split open in Eret’s chest, like a pomegranate cracked in half, all the scarlet glistening seeds spilling out like blood. It’s sharper than heartache and stings like an infected wound and all Eret can think, making their way unsteadily up the ladder, is _Get to the north turret, and Dream will be there, and maybe it won’t feel so much like my heart is falling out of my chest._

The northernmost turret of Eret’s castle is Dream’s favorite, the one he always goes to when he wants to be quiet, their personal bubble. It’s the place where Eret thinks they get along best. They keep their differences in opinion to the throne room, where Eret always feels a little like a glass cannon, where Dream always looks like the devil he’s made out to be; sometimes it’s difficult to be friends with Dream for how much crushing guilt they collectively have wrapped up and associated with L’Manberg - _Manberg._

 _Oh Wilbur, oh Tommy,_ thinks Eret, and has to stop on the ladder because they’re shaking so badly, presses their forehead to the rickety rungs, and the cutting autumn wind overhead sounds like it’s wailing _Wilbur, Tommy, Wilbur, Tommy._

“Eret?” comes a weary, familiar voice. Eret looks up to see a sliver of night sky blocked out by Dream’s tousled hair. “Is that you?”

The sight of Dream, despite being ruffled and half-obscured, is a much-needed comfort, and it gives Eret the strength they needed to pull themself up the last few rungs and take Dream’s proffered hand and hoist themself up onto the turret. They let go to smooth down their dark skirt, ignoring the fact that the hem is torn from brambles, ignoring the fact that their hands tremble on the pleats. It’s just because they ran all the way back from the election. It’s just because they ran.

“Hey,” they say, once they’re done pulling themself together. Settle their elbows on the crenels, trying to go for lightness as they talk. “That was...” they search in vain for a suitable adjective and finally settle lamely on “...something.”

Dream doesn’t even snort. The line of his mouth is absentminded as he leans against the wall beside Eret, tipping his back to look up at the stars. A pause, then, “That’s an understatement.”

The line is delivered drily enough that Eret knows Dream’s in no mood for banter. The realization makes them anxious all over again; they don’t know if they can think of the shitshow just now without breaking down. 

Hoping to deflect for a while longer - just until their hands stop shaking - they ask, “Is there anyone left back there? That they might - that might - is there anyone?”

It’s a bad question, and they know it as soon as it leaves their mouth. Dream blanches, crosses his arms so hard his shoulders curl and he shrinks into himself; Eret can see the dirt-smudged creases in his shirt where Sapnap had sprinted over the walkway in front of the stage and thrown himself into Dream’s arms and held Dream’s face in his hands as he stared at his best friend, committing all of him to memory, before running back off, donning armor as he went to go hunt Tommy and Wilbur down on the order of his fiancé’s new president, leaving Dream standing there, alone, his arms still held out as though welcoming someone home. Fundy had already left, having given Dream’s hand a squeeze and Eret a quick pat on the shoulder; George was nowhere to be found. Eret knows people are left in L’Manberg - _Manberg_ that it tears Dream apart to leave there.

When Dream speaks, though, it’s not what they expect. “H,” he says, soft, measured, gaze trained resolutely on the cobblestone underfoot. “He can be trusted, but I don’t know that Schlatt won’t notice that. Ponk, too... Jack, he’s just a kid... so is Purpled... Niki... Karl... Sapnap will stay with him. I’m less worried about Karl. Um.” He bites his lip. “George. Didn’t see him anywhere. Fundy, he’s too close to the presidency. Quackity. He’s _way_ too close to the presidency.” He sighs and adjusts his mask where Sapnap had shifted it and mumbles into his hand, “Tubbo.”

There are a lot of things to address, one of them being the fact that Dream quite literally listed every single L’Man - _Manbergian_ citizen, but, well. “Tubbo,” agrees Eret, scrubbing their hands over their face. “What do we _do,_ Dream?”

Dream straightens and turns to face outward, toward the other country. Eret’s castle is too far from the border for either of them to be able to see anything useful, but what they can see is the fireworks going off over where the stage must be, all red and white and blue on the evergreen treetops, a flag burning away flickering into the breeze. It smells like smoke. Eret can’t watch.

“I don’t know,” Dream admits. His mask lights up blue briefly before he shifts away to look at Eret. “Well, what I do know is that you can’t get involved in this.”

Eret sharpens their tone. “Dream - ”

“You’re the king of our side of the border, Eret,” Dream reminds them, not unkindly. “No matter who he’s got under his thumb over there, no matter who he’s ordered hunted down, diplomatically speaking, our hands are tied. Schlatt was elected democratically.” His voice wanes, faraway: “He can be as tyrannical as he likes. We can’t do anything through official channels.”

Eret hates that Dream’s right. They know full well he’s right. For all that it’s Dream’s world and he could have made it as lawless as he liked, there were unspoken rules that everyone knew, mostly by hearsay, and Dream kept things civil for the most part, playing neutral score-settler for any conflicts. Ponk’s lemon tree, the debacle with Sapnap and the pets. To hear Dream as good as say “I can’t do anything about it” is worrying, to say the least.

“Let’s shelve that,” sighs Dream, and Eret purses their lips but leaves it. Dream had only mentioned “official channels”, which means he’s liable to go out and play vigilante, which Eret doesn’t particularly love the idea of, either, but he’s the best asset they’ve got, so. 

“And you, Eret?” Dream asks, jolting Eret out of thoughts of international relations and assassination. The question has no context, and they stare at Dream blankly.

“Come again?” they ask cautiously. 

Dream nods his head toward L’Man - _Manberg._ He’s nothing but gentle when he says, “Anyone back there you care about?”

Eret almost blacks out, they think. A dozen thoughts go scampering through their head at once - _Niki, sweet, gentle Niki who’d just as soon stab a person as she would offer them potions - Fundy at the dinner table back when it was still about fucking drugs, laughing brightly as he recounts a brief skirmish with Punz - Tubbo, wide-eyed and clever to a fault, standing with his chin tipped high under Schlatt’s megalomanic hand - Tommy and his brashness and bravery and devil-may-care attitude and blazing, unquenchable love for L’Manberg and the people who built it, who sacrificed the things he cares so deeply about to raise the flag of his country - Wilbur, whose love for his country is a different, slow, all-encompassing kind of love, who planted the seeds of his country into the soil first - Wilbur taking steps backward til his back hits the wall, eyes huge and despairing, the images overlap and it’s like they’re Schlatt when Wilbur barks, “Traitor - ”_

“Is this my fault, Dream?” Eret says, abrupt, because it just occurs to them. They think about it all the time - close their eyes and it’s a flash beneath their eyelids and it’s Dream and George and Punz and Sapnap cornering his friends in an obsidian room and it was never meant to be with a smile that’s all teeth - but the dots suddenly connect and something is breaking down, down, down, shattering into a million pretty pieces. “This - the election - Tommy and Wilbur - Dream, is this - ?”

“Eret,” says Dream, voice pulled taut; Eret can’t hear him for how loud the roaring in their ears has gotten. 

“Oh,” they say, “oh, no,” and their hands are snarled in their hair and they don’t know when they sat down. “Dream, I think this is my fault, I think when I pushed that button - oh god - ” their chest hurts, rattling in, like someone put an anvil on their solar plexus and everything creaks like an old empty house, and they can’t even tell if it’s their heart shutting down or their bones splintering, “butterfly effect, right, that one thing, that one - that one tiny thing - fuck, _fuck - ”_ the cobblestone swoops beneath their feet, closer than it was before, their hands luminous white in the blurry black of the night and against the smudged turret floor, everything spinning away, “I thought I was doing the right thing - I thought I was in the right - but I think I’ve been wrong the entire time, I think - I think we - I - ” and their words bubble away like blood, fizzling into incoherence as they reach their lips, because holy shit, they _can’t breathe._

Vaguely, Eret fancies a smutch of green crouches down before them, feels something scalding hot or blisteringly cold on their arms that may be fingertips, a muffled underwater _“Eret? Eret!”_ barely audible through the sound of their breath tumbling out from between their ribs, a staggering graceless thing. Their main focus right now is not fucking dying.

Dimly, at the back of their mind, they realize that they’re having a panic attack, and that the logical course of action would be to take deep breaths.

The louder part of them that sounds suspiciously like their heartbeat stuttering erratically screams at them to pay attention and grip the wheel because if they don’t breathe faster their lungs are gonna collapse and their brain will blow out and they’ll be stuck like this, like a balloon pricked with a needle, dying down until there’s just a faint wisp of paper left that’s thinner than the air they’re breathing.

The green smear is frightened; it recites something that sounds like numbers and Eret tries to follow along, they _do,_ but it all gets drowned out by the siren song of every possible muscle and tendon and bone in their body trying to poison them from the inside out.

They nearly choke when they mix up when to inhale and when to exhale. They’re going to die.

They pick a moment to breathe in, shivery, and that’s the moment they hear Dream say, voice thin, with crystal clarity, “Oh god.”

And all of a sudden, just as unexpected as before, the jitters that had ridden their veins all the way up into their head and made them flash hot and cold in the space of minutes and brought their heart plummeting to the ground just... dissipate. Early morning mist, dewdrops on grass, it all just soaks into the air, wanes, erodes. Their chest doesn’t throb. They don’t mix up the order of their breaths.

“Oh,” they say, slow, breathless, and look up at Dream, whose fingers are still light as snow on their forearms. They don’t expect Dream to slump back and nearly crack his head on the outcropped ledge where the ladder ends and the floor begins. They cry out in alarm and catch Dream by the hand when he pitches backward.

“Dream?” they demand, searching his face, trying to read his expression as best they can even though the only slice of his face visible is his mouth and how unnaturally pale he’s gone. “Dream, what’s wrong, are you alright?”

“Fine,” gasps Dream, bringing his hand to his head, waves them off with the other. “The cold got to me all of a sudden - I’m fine.” His gaze darts to Eret, drained but still keenly analytical. “And - that’s the question _I_ should be asking. Are you okay?”

Eret startles, drops their eyes to their hands. Flexes them once or twice, digs deep to try to tell if any dregs of that overwhelming fear are still left over waiting for them to falter. Weirdly - really, _really_ weirdly - there’s nothing. They feel okay. They feel more than okay, no low hum of anxiety prowling at the edges of their thoughts like it’d been all day.

That’s not normal at all.

That was a panic attack that frankly blows every other panic attack they’ve had right out of the water for its severity and intrusiveness, and even with milder attacks they’ve never, not once, felt this _normal_ after falling as hard as they did. That’s not a thing. There’s always the shaking that won’t bloody stop, and Eret tends to feel the echo of the anxiety in their marrow for hours afterward. They don’t often panic like this - they usually don’t let things get to them like this. And yet the election, and the fireworks, and Schlatt laughing without stopping to take a breath on the podium, and the expression of blatant panic, of betrayal, of terror on Tommy’s face when he looked to Wilbur for guidance, and the expression on Wilbur’s face as he stared up at the stage...

It’s the train of thought that had led to their attack, and to avoid triggering themself again Eret checks the thought, studies what’s actually surrounding them, but when they’re brought back to themself there’s nothing that feels like they’re standing on a cliff’s edge again. It’s remarkable. It’s weird.

“Eret?” Dream says, with a tone that tells Eret it’s not the first time he’s repeated himself. His pallor’s still not quite right but he looks less shaky and his gaze is searching as he peers into Eret’s face, trying to gauge their response. “Are you okay?”

That’s the problem. They are.

“Yeah,” they finally say, and Dream sighs in relief as he leans away to rest his shoulder against the wall next to Eret, clasping his hands and pulling them in close to his chest again.

“Okay,” he murmurs, running his fingers along his hood, teeth catching on his lip, a veritable collection of nervous habits that Eret has noticed over time. “Okay.”

 _What a pair we make,_ Eret thinks, strangely wistful, and they reach out to stop Dream picking at a tear in his hood, keep holding onto his hand even after he stops. He looks at them and his eyes glint green and dismayed under his mask and they whisper nonsensical reassurances that are just as much for him as they are for themself. _What a pair we make, the two kings of the Dream SMP, falling apart for a country we tried to destroy first._

Dream clenches Eret’s hand, and they look down to where their fingers are twined with his as he says, breathless, “I’m... I’m going to do everything I can.”

And Eret thinks of HBomb, just weeks ago, asking them about minor gods. They’d thought maybe he’d been talking about Dream, who he’d spent the entire day with, who’d helped him gather a truly mind-boggling amount of wool in a short period of time. It doesn’t make sense. None of it does. Not their panic attack, cleanly wiped away with no bitter aftertaste; not the insinuation that Dream is a minor god, because minor deities can only create and manipulate worlds. There is nothing, anywhere, that says minor gods can ease pain.

Eret has a very bad feeling in their gut, watching Dream stare down at his toes, calculating, his mind running a million miles a minute, too fast for his body to catch up.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” they blurt.

Dream looks startled when he glances up at them, but then his face melts down warm, and the smile on his face is excruciatingly gentle when he says, “Can’t make any promises.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i took some liberties with who was actually a citizen of manberg (i put a lot of people who weren’t logging on at the time as manbergian finger guns) canon is a sandbox and i am a toddler
> 
> WE HIT 1000 KUDOS POG!!!! thank you guys so so much for liking this fic enough to give it a read and a kudos, special thanks to yall down in the comments, and like!!! yo!!!!! 1000!!! i yelled so loud when i saw that my mum walked into my room and i had to play it off


	16. quackity (water to blood)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quackity is a snake in the grass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: alcoholism (with minecraft mechanics in mind), implied emotional manipulation. these tags are in reference to the character of jschlatt in the dream smp rp, not the real-life jschlatt. 
> 
> guys i can’t find schlatt’s age anywhere and it frightens me because in the lunch club intro video he said “i’m twenty-seven” but according to other sources he is twenty-one and all of it is really just contributing to my initial impression that schlatt is beyond the grasp of mankind. anyway that’s why i swerve schlatt’s age so hard in this chapter

It’s not like Quackity and Schlatt go way back. Quackity knows Schlatt from back when he was still world-hopping a lot, his crystal always in hand, and when he was seventeen he ran into some dude running a corrupt cryptocurrency ring or some shit like that who looked like he had a devil on his shoulder, all straight-faced humor, all cynical smiles. Quackity liked him for how he acted bigger than he was, the showmanship and swagger, and he stayed with Schlatt for a solid few weeks before the world got boring and Quackity got antsy. Another point in Schlatt’s favor - he didn’t try to make Quackity stay, knew Quackity always had other places to be, didn’t take it as a personal slight the way some people might; laughed and shook Quackity’s hand and said, “See you around, man,” with a certainty in his voice that convinced Quackity he’d definitely see Schlatt around again, regardless of how unlikely it was. 

Still, they go far back enough that now, two years later, Quackity knows that something is fundamentally wrong with the Schlatt who becomes president of Manberg. 

It’s not just the drinking, though that’s a part of it. Quackity met a lot of different people during his wandering days - hey, who’s he to judge someone’s vices? - but even when he was hanging out with Schlatt in SMPLive, Schlatt rarely drank, and certainly not to this degree, leaving half-empty bottles like a trail of breadcrumbs behind him, throwing flasks when he gets a little too tipsy and a little too pissed-off. Quackity cleaned up after him for the first two days, hating the headachey reek of it hanging all around the White House like fog, but the bottles always came back, so he let them be. Vice President may be a powerless seat but Quackity sure as hell wasn’t gonna play housemaid for someone masquerading in his friend’s skin. 

No, it’s the way he treats other people that’s gotten fucked-up. Even if Schlatt liked to push his jokes further than most other people, he always knew when to stop, and his biting humor was harmless more often than not. Now, though... 

That kid, Tubbo. Quackity’s spent enough time bouncing between warring factions servers to be able to tough out rough times, and he thinks Fundy’s good at coping, too, if the furtive glances toward Schlatt and that leather-bound book he keeps on him are any indication. But Tubbo seems half Quackity’s age and height on a good day, and is way too smart for his own good, and Quackity sometimes catches him in the bathrooms with his elbows braced on the sink and his fingers knotted in his hair. He smiles like the sun coming up when Quackity cracks a joke over lunch. He spends break talking to the bees in the garden. 

Or that’s how he was at the beginning. He still smiles when Quackity jokes and leaves the break room to go look at the bees, but his spine has curved down into itself and his eyes are going sharp and when Schlatt slurs, “Tubbo,” butchering the two entire syllables of Tubbo’s name, the kid’s face turns to stone and he does exactly what Schlatt tells him, no questions asked. 

It comes to a head for Quackity one afternoon when Fundy kicks down the door to his quarters in the mansion, shouting at him to get up already, Tubbo’s calling, which is the nicer way to say that Schlatt’s calling, so Quackity bitches about it as loudly as he can and is still only partially dressed by the time he knocks on the door to the president's office. He’s expecting Schlatt’s unshaven face to greet him, maybe a barbed joke, maybe a cruel smile that’s losing its Schlatt-ness day by day. 

Instead the stench of vomit slaps Quackity in the face when he opens the door, and he claps his hand over his nose and mouth reflexively. 

“What the shit,” he says, then tears his eyes away from the mess to look at the presidential desk, and he feels his jaw drop open one moment, is scrambling to the desk the next. 

Schlatt’s in a heap over his desk, his breathing sounding weird and fuzzy in his throat, moaning lowly. When Quackity squints, he can just barely make out the telltale colorful curlicues of a potion effect wisping off of his clothes. The dots connect. His fear morphs into what could be called enraged amazement. 

“Did you fucking drink til you poisoned yourself?” he demands, high, incredulous, even though Schlatt is way past the point of being able to hear him, let alone respond. 

“I think so,” comes a quiet voice from behind him; Quackity whirls to see Tubbo in the corner, picking up neglected bottles and dropping them into the wastebasket in his arms. “I have milk on me at all times anyway, but he threw up the first time I gave it to him, so I’m leaving him alone for now.” He points at the pile of sick chilling out on the floor with a cracked bottle. “Can you get that?”

“You want me to clean that shit up?” Quackity eyes Schlatt and the consequences of his actions with mild disgust, weighing the pros and cons in his head and finding the cons are winning. “Tubbo, I’m sorry, but I feel like this is a bit under my pay grade.”

“None of us are paid,” Tubbo says drily. 

“My metaphorical pay grade!”

“Quackity,” Tubbo says, and it’s the stinging exasperation in his tone that gets Quackity to turn and look at him. He’s completely taken aback by the fucking steel in Tubbo’s eyes when he snaps, “Can you please just do as you’re fucking told,” and it’s like he’s back at the night before the election and Schlatt’s gripping his hand too hard to be friendly and his eyes are acid gold and his words catch on his teeth for how ragged they are at the edges _“Just do as you’re fucking told - ”_

“Right,” Quackity breathes, and wanders back down the hall, dazed, looking for a mop.

He comes to like an hour later in his quarters and recalls, after an effort, that he cleaned up and left the office while Tubbo picked up the mountain of garbage in there, neither of them saying a word, but it’s vague, gauzy at the edges as though he dreamt all of it, and all of a sudden Quackity can’t fucking stand being cooped up in the fucking White House while Schlatt sleeps off getting drunk off his ass and Fundy’s holed up in god-knows-where doing god-knows-what and Tubbo putters around the office, small and severe. He puts on a sweatshirt over his suit and scrapes his greasy hair into his beanie and leaves to take a walk, or - something. Anything. Just get some fresh air.

He heads down the hill, mostly following the cobblestone walkway, and peers up into the setting sun. Manberg might’ve been pretty, once. It still is, to be fair, but Quackity thinks there was a kind of snow-globe beauty about L’Manberg when it still had walls and it still had nature. Now it’s more of a dystopian, grey series of buildings that look like they’ve been cut out with a slide rule, and no one’s bothered to sweep away the snowy ashes of the previous flag or the crossbow bolts stuck in the ground from when they were all hunting down the ex-president and his little brother, so it all just looks... hurt. Beaten. Hollow.

Quackity peels off from the main road and toward the line of trees that cover the hills that surround Manberg, wanting to get away from the bleak valley his friend is supposed to be ruling over. It’s just his fucking luck that he clears two tiny streams and crosses the river and runs smack into the sworn enemy of his country, whose gaze snaps to him the moment Quackity sets foot on the opposite bank.

Quackity gulps and backs up two steps, hands held up. “Hi, Dream,” he says, strangled.

Dream doesn’t answer. He looks like he might’ve been doing laundry or something, his netherite chestplate buffed and shiny off to the side and his helmet still dripping with water, his boots and leggings further away down the bank. His hair is tied back in a bun. He looks harmless enough, which makes Quackity relax, until Dream catches sight of the iron sword at Quackity’s hip and tenses up, and Quackity realizes Dream’s axe is literally right there, hidden by the tall grass, so, okay, he’s fucked.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt you or anything, I’ll just be on my way,” he says hurriedly, and moves to blend back into the bushes mysteriously so that he can book it back to the White House, but Dream immediately reaches after him, says, “Quackity, wait!” and Quackity has no idea why he listens to someone who could probably eviscerate him on the spot but Dream sounds so imploring that Quackity waits.

“Yes?” he says, trying not to sound like he’s ten seconds from peeing himself. 

Dream pauses, runs the hem of his hoodie over the helmet to dry it off. When he speaks, he sounds careful. “Are you... okay?”

Quackity trots out about two-thirds of his always-on-standby “Hell yeah I am, I’m just a ray of sunshine today, good sir, I’m feeling like the bee’s fuckin’ knees,” before he does a double-take, cutting himself off. 

“Did you just ask me if I was okay?” he asks suspiciously.

Dream scrubs his helmet harder. 

“Uh,” says Quackity, a little dumbfounded, because, well.

Quackity and Dream don’t go back the way Quackity and Schlatt do. They know each other mostly by circumstance; they’re both in the public eye to an extent, what with Quackity making a name for himself as a mediator in petty faction squabbles and Dream being Dream. Quackity knows Tommy’s the one that asked for him to join the world, probably as a bit, but the kicker’s that Dream actually went through with it, welcoming him in with open arms, joking that Quackity was free to steal from Tommy as he liked. It’s something Quackity didn’t forget, wanderer that he is; the worlds he jumped to usually didn’t want him there. It’s not the first time Quackity’s been offered a home, but it is the first time the people there acted like they meant it, Purpled offering him glowstone dust offhand one day, Callahan leaving bonemeal at his doorstep another, and - it chokes Quackity up to admit it, but he’s really fond of this place, and now someone who looks like his friend, who doesn’t act anything like his friend, is burning it down to the ground.

Quackity’s mouth goes dry, and he scuffs the dirt at his feet with his shiny, pinching shoes, very unsuited to running. “Um,” he mumbles, beating around the bush, because even if he’s desperately fond of the people here he knows lines have been drawn now and he’s seen that Dream isn’t above Schlatt’s decrees. 

“If you don’t wanna say,” says Dream, not looking up from his helmet (which is looking plenty dry by this point to Quackity), “that’s totally fine. But people don’t usually leave Schlatt’s side without a reason.” His gaze flickers upward, touches upon the single spire of the White House that’s just barely visible over the treetops, pearlescent under the final scarlet streaks of the setting sun. 

His wording and his tone are deliberate in a way that sets off at least five red flags in Quackity’s head. “You say that,” he says slowly, “as though people leave Schlatt’s side often.”

Even without seeing a fair bit of Dream’s face, Quackity can tell the world owner’s giving him a wide-eyed aw-shucks look. “Did I? That’s weird. But that’s beside the point.” He returns to rigorously polishing his helmet, head bent over the netherite armor, pointedly avoiding looking at Quackity. Giving him an out, Quackity realizes. “You don’t have to answer, but I wanted to ask, are you okay?”

Quackity could leave. Dream’s looking away for a reason. Quackity could run away from this very loaded conversation, right here, right now; run back to Schlatt’s alcohol-soaked side and clean up his messes, shifty-eyed Fundy to one side and steely-eyed Tubbo to the other, and pretend like the entire world is holding up under the massive shifts in foundation Quackity experiences with every garbled insult Schlatt throws at those under his control. At least there, Quackity can read everyone else’s next move; at least there, Quackity can make sure Schlatt’s more abrasive than abusive. 

But. Quackity knows enough about human nature to know that’s not how this works. He’s seen enough tyrants, seen enough uprisings, seen enough downfalls to know that if Quackity runs from Dream now, he’s going to become just another casualty to JSchlatt. If someday his friend snaps the hell out of whatever fucking wild-eyed fugue he’s in and realizes he ruined people for good, he won’t be able to take it. If he becomes the reason Quackity can’t take orders without dissociating and the reason Fundy flinches away from shouting and the reason Tubbo the sixteen-year-old turns into a pale little shadow of the person he could’ve grown up to be, Schlatt will break himself apart trying to atone, and Quackity can’t bear witness to that.

Even if Schlatt’s a monster right now, Quackity can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong.

“I think,” he tells Dream, timid, “that I chose the wrong side.”

It all comes spilling out of him like Dream’s a goddamn confessional after that. “I just - I don’t fucking _understand._ That’s not - that’s not him! That’s not the Schlatt I know. I know that’s the same fucking thing all people say when someone they know flips out and commits atrocities, but I’m right by his side like twenty-four-seven, okay, and that is absolutely not the guy I used to play three rounds of Monopoly before bed with. And - and the way he acts - the way he treats other people - like they’re dolls, or puppets, or something - I can’t trust him, and I think it’s a sign that maybe I should be going to Wilbur and Tommy, maybe, but I don’t even know if they’ll take me because I’m so close with - I was - I’m so close with Schlatt.” Quackity’s breathing a little hard after his rant, but it’s true, all of the thoughts that have flitted through his mind that he stuffed into a box and locked away for another day handed over to Dream with no filter attached. He can’t help how young he sounds when he admits, “I don’t know what to do.”

Dream’s looking at him full-on, now, his helmet dropped to the grass long ago. His hands are fisted on his knees and he’s staring into Quackity’s face and the line of his mouth is unreadable, but then he stands in one swift move and leaps across the brook and Quackity’s entire life flashes before his eyes before he realizes Dream’s just holding out his hands, palms up, not reaching, an offer.

Quackity places his hands gingerly in Dream’s. He doesn’t know why he’s so surprised by how warm, how genuine, how _human_ Dream feels.

“Okay,” Dream murmurs lowly, keeping his fingers uncurled so that Quackity can extricate himself from Dream’s grip anytime he likes. His eyes dart up to touch on Quackity’s, dart down again. He sighs like the world’s pressing down on his shoulders and says reluctantly, “I can’t... promise anything,” and for some reason it disappoints Quackity to hear that, which is stupid; it’s not like Dream is all-powerful. He’s just as much at the mercy of everyone around him as Quackity is. Dream squeezes Quackity’s hands, though, and he sounds so very tired when he says, “I can only promise that you’ll be safe,” and drops his hands, places his steps carefully back over the river, gathers up the pieces of his armor, and backs off into the heavy cloak of night.

Quackity stands there gaping at his hands for probably a minute or two, feeling funnily like something profound just happened but not really sure what. Dream’s promise sits like an ember in his chest. 

Then it hits him that it’s properly night now, and Schlatt has likely snapped out of his self-administered alcohol poisoning. _Aw, fuck._

Quackity jogs - not sprints, because sprinting for longer than two minutes triggers his gag reflex, as it should for any normal human being - back to the silent, gleaming White House. It takes something like fifteen minutes, and the night’s gotten much deeper by the time he pulls up short, panting, at the doors, supporting himself on the cold quartz of the doorway. 

Tubbo’s the one who opens the door. Quackity has two seconds to stare blankly down at him in panic before Tubbo cries, “Big Q!” and throws his arms around Quackity in a bear hug to end all bear hugs.

“Oh,” says Quackity.

“I’m sorry,” Tubbo says, muffled, into Quackity’s sweatshirt. “For what I said earlier. That was something like what - I said something really rude, and I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” Quackity says again, louder, and wraps his arms around Tubbo, all the cold he’d felt earlier falling away. Tubbo’s apology rekindles something in Quackity that whispers _Maybe the kid’s still within reach; maybe Tubbo can still be saved._

“I was worried,” explains Tubbo, pulling away and tugging Quackity in by the arm, “because it got dark so quickly after you’d gone and I thought you didn’t bring a weapon with you.” He gestures to the unused iron sword at Quackity’s hip and says brightly, “I’m glad you went prepared!”

Quackity short-circuits, stopping dead in the middle of the hallway. He hadn’t processed that until now - the fact that’s the sun’s long gone over the horizon, that it must be around seven at night, that the mobs should’ve been all over him as he headed back to the White House. He wasn’t even running that fast; a spider or skeleton could’ve easily got a piece of him and it would’ve all been over from there. Dream’s world isn’t set to peaceful. By all accounts, Quackity should be zombie dinner.

“Quackity?” asks Tubbo, frowning, as he turns and spots Quackity standing there like an idiot, jaw dropped. “Are you okay?”

Dream asking “Are you okay,” Dream saying “I can’t promise anything,” Dream saying _“You’ll be safe”_ as he grips Quackity’s hands. The flash of green eyes going hard. How completely and utterly _safe_ Quackity had felt, taking his sweet fucking time back to the White House.

“Quackity?”

“Yeah,” says Quackity, shaking himself out of it. Blinks away the memory of Dream promising his safety, hostile mobs avoiding him like the plague, of Schlatt surely passed out in some corner, and assures Tubbo, patting the kid’s shoulder, “Yeah, I’m okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact this chapter’s subtitle was almost “chekhov’s gun” until november fucking 16th of 2020


	17. tommy (most disputes die and no one shoots)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tommy learns how a legacy dies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> these chapters are steadily getting longer and as someone that used to write around 1k words for a chapter that is just pure serotonin
> 
> i’ve been looking forward to this chapter for so long folks you have no idea. the drama. the suspense. the outline for this chapter is 362 words long. for context, fundy’s was 12 words
> 
> probably a good time to drop in another reminder: NOT A BASHING FIC. it's all leading somewhere, i _promise_

It’s not noticeable at first, which is saying something. 

Tommy has been on Wilbur’s heels for years, ever since Phil adopted him, before he was even old enough to remember anything other than a smear of yellow jumper and dark curls. They were the first two, though Tubbo came along not long after, and Tommy maintains that as the youngest of his siblings he is the most favored. He gets away with a lot of shit because he’s the littlest, after all, and annoying Wilbur, the eldest, was and remains a treasured pastime of his. Tommy can’t count the number of times Phil had to break them up because Tommy had pestered Will one too many times or Will had tripped Tommy down the stairs again. 

Anyway, all that’s to say that as much as they torment each other they’re peas in a pod in a different way than Tommy and Tubbo are, in a different way than Wilbur and Niki are. Tommy likes to think he and his oldest brother balance each other out, Tommy mostly loud and Wilbur mostly mild-mannered, Tommy a lit fuse and Wilbur a TNT deposit in the ground. Tommy knows Wilbur and Wilbur knows Tommy. It’s how they were able to raise L’Manberg. They just fit. 

So Tommy lets it slide the first few times Wilbur snaps, sitting in the ravine with his head in his hands and swearing a blue streak. Tommy gets it, he does; where Tommy rages for a few minutes then gets up and moves on to rectify whatever set him off, Wilbur always holds on to the anger like it’s a hot coal and buries it under his chest and won’t fucking let go of it. In Tommy’s opinion, it’s one of Will’s biggest weaknesses. The third time Wilbur punches the wall and this time sprains his wrist, Tommy tells him so imperiously, and the look that gathers on Wilbur’s face like stormclouds is vicious enough that Tommy shuts up and binds Wilbur’s wrist for him and reminds him none too kindly to stop punching walls, please.

At first he thinks it’s just because Wilbur’s going stir-crazy, cooped up underground with Tommy like a couple of vermin, hunted down by some goat-looking arsehole with a god complex that has their brother by the throat. That’s what’s getting to Tommy, at least; he keeps thinking of awful things that could happen to Tubbo if Schlatt ever finds out Tubbo’s a spy, and it gets Tommy’s blood boiling every time. Those are usually the days he spends sitting between tree branches, crunching on an apple and watching his fellow L’Manbergians tear down the walls they all built together. 

He’s learned from Wilbur, too; he knows when he should gather all the anger together, condense it into magma at the back of his throat, learned to stoke the flames so that he has something to keep him burning when the going gets hard. 

But that’s not what this is. It can’t possibly be what this is. 

Even when he’s pissed off, Wilbur’s predictable. It’s what makes him a bad fighter; play him twice and you can read him like an open fucking book. He’ll stomp around, maybe vandalize the house if he’s feeling particularly tilted, and he always retaliates, so Tommy learned to be careful around Wilbur for the first two days or so after making him mad because Wilbur always got his revenge without fail. So Tommy doesn’t sweat over Wilbur’s weirdly obsessive fury about their banishment; this too shall pass and all that flowery literary bullshit Techno loves to spout. So what if Wilbur’s pacing round muttering to himself; getting knocked on the head and shot through the heart will do that to a bloke, never mind how Tommy sometimes sits bolt upright at night seeing Wilbur with an arrow through his chest under his eyelids. Will’s probably still angry about getting chased out of their own country and getting killed during the escape. 

But Tommy gives it a week and it doesn’t cool off. Not even after two weeks, not even after two weeks and a half. 

By the third week of Wilbur’s brooding and talking to himself and general descent into madness Tommy’s just about bouncing off the walls with how bad his cabin fever is. If he spends another goddamn second with the raving lunatic that’s replaced his brother he might just kill the man himself. It’s surprisingly easy to ignore how destructive, how ruinous his brother’s gotten when Tommy thinks of the flag they labored over together unspooling into the sky, the ugly black and napalm-orange flag that replaced it. Honestly, he’s still clinging to the hope that it’s some ninth stage of grief yet undiscovered. Still, he takes long walks skirting dangerously close to the crumbled borders of L’Manberg to take his mind off of it. 

It’s there that he gets the private message. He glances down at his wrist, glances back up, then screeches in shock as he brings his wrist up to his face so fast he nearly knocks himself out, scanning the brief text repeatedly to check for any catches. 

It’s clear as day. _i have something for you_ from Dream. 

Instinctively, Tommy shoots back, _how the fuck do i know yuo arent trying to trick me????_

“Believe me, if I were trying to trick you, I would have made my move already.”

Tommy feels the adrenaline start _buzzing_ at that voice. He spins and rams his sword into the trunk of the nearest tree, hard enough to make the branches shake, not even wasting time to howl in surprise; he has no idea how Dream got this close without him noticing. 

As luck would have it, Dream drops down out of the next tree over, so now Tommy just looks like an idiot with his sword stuck in a tree. To make up for it, Tommy scowls at Dream, puffing out his chest to look more threatening; one of the many qualities he prides himself on is the fact that if he squares his shoulders enough, he’s taller than Dream. “Bitch,” he tells Dream tartly.

Dream’s lips quirk briefly beneath the rim of his mask. “Same old Tommy, huh,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest. He’s decked out in his netherite armor, axe at his hip, crossbow and shield strapped to his back, looking like a right prick, all as per usual. 

“You haven’t changed at all either, arsehole,” Tommy replies, trying to ignore how familiar the banter is. It’s been a while since they’ve interacted - the last time Tommy saw Dream was on the night of the fucking election, staring after him and Wilbur as they ran for their goddamn lives, too far away to make out any expression other than a blank hollowness - and Tommy realizes with a thrill of horror that he missed the jokingly barbed back-and-forth he and Dream always shared. It was fun, poking at someone as clever and as infuriatingly patient as Dream, a different fun than Will, which is sticking your hand into a beehive after shaking it, and than Techno, which you might as well be sitting outside in a blizzard waiting for the cold to toast your marshmallows. Dream likes Tommy. Or liked. Tommy’s still not entirely sure how things are going on that front, even if he knows Dream killed him in the duel with every ounce of mercy he had in his body. Wilbur probably didn’t see it that way, and neither did Tubbo, but Tommy knows Niki saw it - that the arrow was an insta-kill, and Tommy wouldn’t have won anyway. It’s all very complicated.

The line of Dream’s mouth thins imperceptibly; he pushes off from the tree, strides toward Tommy. Tommy yanks his sword from his own tree but doesn’t aim it at Dream yet; Dream’s completely relaxed, and no matter how good he is in combat, if Tommy maintains a fair distance, there’s no way Dream can get in a good hit. 

Dream stops a good few blocks away, unbuckles the clasp keeping his crossbow to his back, and weighs it in his hands, pensive. Tommy makes a face at it involuntarily; the thing is ridiculously overpowered and notoriously precious to Dream and everyone on the server knows how much time and effort he put into the stupid thing. It gives off the strong melodic hum of a highly-enchanted object and there’s not even a single crack in it. Tommy briefly pictures Dream crouched over the crossbow at night, meticulously mending nicks in the wood, and snorts.

He’s wholly unprepared for Dream to step right into his personal space and place the crossbow into his arms.

Tommy yelps and nearly drops it. It’s a bit heavier than he expected, even without bolts in it, and he fumbles before wrapping one hand round the tiller and supporting the prod awkwardly with his other hand. The violet sheen of enchantments make the weapon thrum in his grip. It’s easily one of the most powerful things Tommy’s ever held in his hands, second only to that one time when he was a kid when he grabbed a fistful of Phil’s tertials while they were up in the air and almost made them crash into a spruce. 

Instantly, he’s on edge. “Why,” he says warily, glaring first at Dream then down at the crossbow.

Dream’s expressions may be unreadable above his mouth but just by the way his hood shifts Tommy can tell he’s raised an eyebrow. “Can’t I lend a hand to the people whose side I’m on?” he asks mildly.

Tommy feels his jaw drop. Several insane ideas occur to him at once, among them being an impulse to break the crossbow right over his knee and another being to roundhouse-kick Dream in the face, but all of it takes a back seat to the burning, million-pound question: “What the _fuck_ d’you mean, _the people whose side you’re on,”_ Tommy demands, ignoring the reasonable voice at the back of his head with practiced ease and storming right up to Dream. “All you’ve been doing the entire time is undermining me and Wilbur! You said it yourself - from the start, you wanted ‘white flags, by dawn, something something, I’m a little bitch.’” He shoves the crossbow into Dream’s face and snarls, “Your interests have never been to help L’Manberg, it’s always been for your personal gain, you’ve never given a shit, so why don’t you run back to Schlatt or whoever the hell’s side you’re on and bitch to them about how you couldn’t get Tommy to believe your shitty lies?”

Dream doesn’t even flinch. He pushes the crossbow firmly back toward Tommy and states clearly, “I mean it. You got me all wrong, Tommy - I care.” His voice falters when he says the word _care_ , like it hurts him to say it, and Tommy’s bewildered by the sudden emotion, but Dream picks it back up immediately. “I _care_ , I do, and it’s fine if you don’t believe me, but take the crossbow, okay? It’s probably the best weapon on this server right now.” He purses his lips. “You’re gonna need it, because I can’t outright help, either.”

Tommy is just being thrown so many fucking curveballs right now. “First you tell me you wanna be on our side, then you say you can’t be seen being on our side?” Tommy has to laugh, cringes a little at how bitter it sounds. “Dream, your crossbow as good as screams ‘Dream’s with Pogtopia’ in all caps with fucking glitter effects. What’re you trying to get at? Quit avoiding the point.”

Another fleeting smile passes over Dream’s face. “You’re Pogtopia now? Cool name,” he says approvingly (and oh fuck him, Tommy does _not_ like how much he wants to preen at the praise, the way he did when Techno whooped after Tommy demonstrated his newfound literacy by reciting a shitty poem to him at the dinner table), then flicks his gaze to the ruins of L’Manberg just two chunks or so beyond the edge of the forest they’re standing in. “I just,” he says quietly, crossing his arms again but hunching his shoulders into it as well, “can’t be on any particular side.” A pause. “When I said I care, Tommy, I’m not just talking about you guys. I invited everyone here for a reason. Because I care. A lot.” Another pause, longer this time; Tommy beats down the urge to fidget. “That’s why I can’t be explicitly on your side. I want... I’m on everyone’s side. I have to be.”

Tommy waits, expecting Dream to continue. Instead, a lengthy silence unravels between them, buoyed up into the gentle breeze of the rather nice autumn afternoon, and it’s just Dream and Tommy, Tommy and Dream, Tommy and someone he could wring the neck of but at the same time feels very sad for for unfathomable reasons. He doesn’t even know why sympathy is bubbling up in his gut. (That’s a lie.) 

Finally, the silence stretches long enough to be a bit uncomfortable. Tommy really has nothing more to say, so he shrugs and offers, “Well, thanks, y’know - for the crossbow. Reckon I might be able to shoot some sense into Wilbur with this, with how fucking creepy he’s gotten,” and he doesn’t mean anything much by it, but Dream’s entire body coils up like a spring and his head snaps around to stare at Tommy.

“What,” he says. It doesn’t sound like a question.

“What the fuck,” Tommy answers, confused by Dream’s vehement reaction, but Dream starts forward right up to Tommy’s face and his voice is strained when he says, “Tommy, what do you mean - what’s wrong with Wilbur,” and that’s when Tommy gets it.

“Oh, I didn’t - Wilbur’s just going a little nuts right now, the whole exile thing, y’know,” Tommy explains hastily, but nothing about Dream says he’s appeased by the clarification; if anything, he tenses up even more.

“Can you specify?” 

Tommy’s so done with all of this already, honestly, how many more times does the world need to be turned on its head for one day? “Goddammit, Dream, will you leave me alone if I list off all the fucking weird shit Will’s been going on about lately? Well, there’s the whole muttering to himself thing he’s gotten into, it’s the most annoying thing. And he punches the fucking walls all the time! He sprained his wrist last time, too, totally unnecessary. And he does this thing where he cusses out some random person that has some affiliation with L’Manberg for no reason, he just does it, and he’ll stay up for days at a time, and... Dream? What’re you doing?”

Dream has tugged his hood over his hair, drawn the strings tighter, has pushed back the sleeves of his hoodie slightly past his elbows. “Tommy,” he says firmly, “can you take me to see Wilbur?”

That voice of reason Tommy quashed earlier is screaming that this might be a bad idea. Tommy mercilessly crushes it under his metaphorical heel and says flippantly, “Sure.”

The brisk walk to Pogtopia is far less comfortable than their chill, emotionally-heavy conversation outside L’Manberg. Every time Tommy opens his mouth to dole out some sort of quip, he catches a glimpse of the look on Dream’s face, and he can’t do anything but shut his mouth again. Tommy has no idea how to describe the way Dream looks right now - rumpled, dishevelled? Tommy hadn’t noticed earlier, preoccupied with far more pressing matters, but as they power-walk to the ravine, Tommy can see that Dream’s hair is free of its usual half-up half-down, that he’s neglected one of the two combat belts he always wears, that his hands tremble minutely as he smooths his hair back and resettles his hood over his head. He looks, quite frankly, like a mess, especially for Dream’s standards; everyone knows Dream likes to maintain a certain level of neatness, is a bit vain about his outward appearance. It’s weird.

The whole thing is weird, actually, and Tommy feels a thread of doubt wind its way through him, but by that point they’ve already arrived, and Tommy’s not exactly one to back out on a promise, so he waves Dream in and prays Wilbur doesn’t make an arse of himself for just ten minutes.

Unfortunately, the old gods must’ve looked down on Tommy today and decided to fuck him over well and proper, because the moment Wilbur spots Dream in their base it all goes downhill.

“Well, well, well!” he croons, standing up from where he was sitting hunchbacked on a stone outcropping, his head in his hands. He gestures grandly around at the cave surrounding them and says, “Welcome to our humble abode, Dream!” His voice drops off low, deadly. “Fancy seeing you here.”

Tommy _hates_ that tone - it sounds all _wrong_ on Wilbur, it sounds _nothing_ like his brother Will, all poison and the glass shards of a broken potions flask - but Dream, true to form, doesn’t back off at all. He squares his shoulders and says, voice deceptively calm, “Hello, Wilbur.”

“Hello to you too, _puppeteer,”_ Wilbur replies acidly, and Tommy catches the flinch in the line of Dream’s mouth. Wilbur sees it, too; he scrunches up his face in mock pity. “Oh, did that hurt a little, Dream? I’m sorry, that wasn’t my intention.” He scans Dream up and down. “Don’t you look a right mess today. Anyhoo! What’s brought you to these parts?”

Dream doesn’t give an inch. “Just checking out the new base,” he says evenly. “Nice decor.”

“It is, isn’t it? Tommy did it.” Wilbur sweeps an arm at the walls. Tommy didn’t, actually, he’s just the one who discovered the ravine and declared it as their temporary headquarters, but all of a sudden, watching Dream and Wilbur circle one another, he finds he can’t break into the conversation, because Wilbur’s eyeing Dream like Wilbur’s an apex predator and Dream’s looking like the “immovable object” part of the “unstoppable force” joke. 

There’s a brutally tense silence. 

“What,” purrs Wilbur, sounding like he’s scraping the words off of the ground, raising all the hairs on the back of Tommy’s neck, “are you doing here, _Dream?”_ Tommy has no clue what about the way Wilbur says Dream’s name sounds so off, but he feels a cold sweat break out on his brow.

“Wilbur,” says Dream, voice impossibly flat.

Wilbur raises his hands in surrender, but his words are anything but as he cries, “Hey, now, I’m not saying anything! Just that you seem to be awfully invested in being on the right side of history.” He twirls a lock of his hair around his hair and says, chipper, “I know you were talking to Quackity a few days ago, you know? Sent him off on his merry way and made sure no mobs got to him.”

Dream _blanches._ Tommy’s never seen a person go so white so fast, and he watches with something like dread beginning to creep up the back of his throat as Dream’s hand darts up to pull at his hood.

Wilbur was watching Dream like a hawk, smiles cruelly when Dream looks back up at him with shock evident in his expression. “That’s right, I know,” he tells him gleefully, spinning in a circle with his arms outstretched before stopping and stepping closer to Dream, his hands clasped behind his back. “So much power at your fingertips and for what? A measly, transient thing? _Oh, ward the hostile mobs away from my flimsy little friend!_ What a _waste.”_

Alright, Wilbur’s officially lost Tommy. World owners aren’t the same things as minor gods, who’re the ones that can make worlds for humans like them. He should know; Phil’s a minor god, a well-known and well-respected and particularly powerful one, and Tommy grew up fiercely protected because Phil had brought him into a world of his creation. But the same way humans always first spawn in a world but aren’t technically the creators of it, world owners can have name rights to the world, have loose control over things like weather (which is finicky) and time of day (which is even worse), and have no power over the worlds they own. The Dream SMP is owned by Dream, probably commissioned from some minor god; for all the rumors that cling to Dream like cobwebs, there’s never been a single one that claims Dream’s a minor god. Minor gods always reveal their status. It gets them places. Dream’s just a really protective world owner; he always has been.

The way Wilbur talks has gone mazelike, though, with death traps round every corner. He stays just out of Dream’s reach but just close enough for Dream to only be able to look at Wilbur, saying shit like “You’re one power-hungry bastard, aren’t you?” and “Can’t even look your _friends_ in the eye.” Tommy can see it getting to Dream, little by little; he thinks, with a rotten feeling, that Will always knew how to get under people’s skin, even if not to this degree.

He tunes back in just as Wilbur sneers, “Are you trying to play _god_ , Dream?”

Dream lurches forward, his face going, if possible, even paler. He stumbles and grabs Wilbur’s wrists and brings his head up to stare full-on into Wilbur’s face and - 

It’s like all the air gets sucked out of Tommy’s lungs, like the world goes stark black-and-white. Tommy can’t breathe, staring at his mad brother and his friendly nemesis. There’s something buzzing in his ears, a steady white-noise blurring out all other sounds except for something - a whisper - a whisper that resolves itself into something silvery that, if Tommy really buckles down and tries to concentrate, sounds like Dream, maybe, just a little, haunting, hurting - _Wilbur Wilbur Wilbur it’s me it’s me where’s the hurt the poison it’s me listen listen listen -_

**_NO._ **

The denial is shrieking, acrid, rattles Tommy all the way down to his skeleton, knocks him way off balance. He reels backward with a noise of complete bewilderment, manages to put his back to a wall, and tries to gather his bearings as everything rings around him. 

There’s a gasping noise, a dripping noise. Tommy waits for the ground to stop swooping beneath his feet before looking up.

Dream has staggered backward as well, one hand flat against his stomach, the other at his mouth, and - Christ, there’s blood weeping from somewhere beneath his mask, trickling down his wrist and dropping to the floor, his breaths sounding all wrong and raggedy in his chest. 

“Get _out,”_ Wilbur shrieks, and Tommy tears his eyes from Dream to stare at his brother, who... who looks nothing like his brother, who’s towering over Dream, whose hands are tangled in his hair, whose face is so contorted with wrath and with hatred that he looks monstrous, and Tommy feels fear shoot icy cold through his veins.

Dream makes a horrible sound, like he might be gagging or he might be sobbing, his hood spilled over his shoulders, his face white as a ghost’s.

Wilbur howls, unearthly, entirely _not him,_ “Get out, _get out,_ you’ve got no fucking right to be here, get _out, if I can’t have L’Manberg...”_

Dream turns and bolts.

Tommy thinks, faintly, that it’s a miracle Dream can even see where he’s placing his feet for how bloody his face is.

“Well,” says Wilbur, his voice abruptly as mild and pleasant as a summer evening, “good thing we scared him off, eh, Tommy?”

Tommy can’t look at Wilbur, can’t turn to look at the thing wearing his brother’s skin. He winds his fingers tighter around the trigger mechanism of Dream’s crossbow and finally, _finally_ fucking understands, with an unwelcome, spiralling, consuming despair: _that’s not Wilbur._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i love having tommy jump between “wilbur” and “will” throughout the chapter it just adds so much “despite annoying the shit out of him i am still very fond of my big brother” energy
> 
> it felt very weird using “z”s in place of “s”s for words like “realize” and “recognize” this chapter, more so than usual. probably some of you have noticed this but i grew up on british english and still spell a lot of words in british english even though i live in the u.s. hot take but i think british english just looks better
> 
> ALSO HI I WROTE THE WHOLE CHAPTER BEFORE REALIZING THE MANBERG FLAG IS BLACK AND RED AND NOT BLACK AND ORANGE DON’T @ ME OKAY


	18. techno (colosseum)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dream had to let Techno in first, you know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TECHNOBLADE ARRIVES POGG!! somebody say rebellion????
> 
> timeline-wise i kind of fucked it up because tommy calls techno in quite early in the canon timeline, so, just. shhh. more sandbox time. tommy couldn’t get in touch with techno chilling on his potato farm until three weeks after banishment and we’ll leave it at that ^^;;;

People tend to underestimate how much combat can tell you about a person. Sure, there’s the surface-level stuff, like handedness and strength and speed, but that’s baseline. Get to Techno’s level and suddenly you’re talking the person’s confidence, their cognitive flexibility, their ability to compartmentalize or their ability to take in everything at once. Techno doesn’t forget what he learns about people through fighting them. It comes in handy all the time.

Like now.

See, with Dream, it’s tougher to psychoanalyze because he’s around Techno’s level, maybe a bit lower. Still, Techno knows plenty about Dream that he thinks Dream probably doesn’t know about himself. He knows Dream’s a naturally confident person, an extension of his mental agility, his self-image. He knows Dream’s also a naturally paranoid person; his world remains under lock and key, he always goads Techno into taking the first swing, he never lets his mask leave his face.

That’s why the one-in-the-morning message from Dream that says _You Have Been Invited to the Dream SMP_ followed by a terse _good morning techno_ is so out-of-character that it takes Techno an unholy amount of caffeine and about thirty minutes of staring at his wrist to absorb the news.

It’s not like Techno hadn’t been worried. Even if he doesn’t contact his brothers often, there’s an unspoken expectation that they all check in with one another at least once every couple of weeks (a lesson learned from back when Tommy and Tubbo first learned to jump worlds and then were impossible to stop until they accidentally stumbled into a hardcore anarchy server), and he hasn’t heard from Wilbur, Tommy, or Tubbo in just over three, a new record. Techno’s not the type to sweat details too much - he thinks it takes too much brain space to constantly worry over every little thing - but they’re still his brothers, and they’re still all in the same place, a world owned by his self-proclaimed rival who also happens to be suspiciously absent from current public events.

Something’s wrong in the Dream SMP.

Put like that, it’s easy for Techno to put aside this season’s crop for another time and gather his things. He doesn’t like to leave his own world, usually only does so to participate in Championship or duels or the like, but he does what he must for his family and his friends, and it looks like he’s going to be spending quite a while in the Dream SMP, probably will be making it his new home, so he packs sparingly but smartly. 

When he steps out at the world spawn point, tugging his crown down to block out some of the harsh morning light, Dream’s there. 

He’s not looking at Techno. He kind of looks like he spent the night leaned against the towering building right in front of spawn, to be honest, clothes creased, hood down, hair everywhere. It’s not an unfamiliar sight, since he and Techno tend to spar until neither of them can stand anymore, but Techno knows Dream to be more meticulous than people would think, and he really doesn’t like the way things are shaping up. 

Very carefully, he says, “Hello, Dream.”

Dream shifts his shoulders and turns his head to face Techno. “Hey, Techno,” he replies, and ouch, Techno doesn’t love the look on Dream’s face, a smile that’s literally anything but happy. Something about the rasp to his voice tells Techno Dream’s probably been pulling an all-nighter or two, too, maybe nursing some kind of injury, and _that_ puts him on edge. Not hearing back from his brothers is one thing. An issue big enough to be negatively affecting the world owner and a talented fighter and strategist is another. 

“Alright, what’s the problem?” Techno asks, sitting down right there at spawn and crossing his legs to wait Dream out in case he’s thinking about deflecting. Some might think his approach is too brusque, but Techno doesn’t sugarcoat or beat around the bush as a matter of principle. Efficiency and straightforwardness is key for good communication, something Techno values. All of his friends know that. Dream knows that, which is why he lets the unconvincing smile slip right off his face like water and cuts to the chase.

“You should know that Tommy asked for you,” he says without preamble, “but I probably would’ve let you in anyway, even if he hadn’t. Things are, uh... things are a little crazy right now.”

Techno raises an eyebrow. _“Tommy_ asked for me?” he asks, not necessarily surprised but definitely skeptical. Even as a child, Tommy was backbreakingly independent, always wanting to be the trailblazer, wouldn’t even ask for help on mundane things like schoolwork. He takes pride in being the wild card, in being unpredictable, in riding solo. That it’s not the laid-back Wilbur calling on Techno, or the arguably most-responsible Tubbo...

“Dream,” Techno warns, “I’m getting a bad feeling.”

Dream’s laugh is tired. “Oh, just wait ‘til you hear about the politics around here.”

The word “politics” sends a shiver up Techno’s spine, not that he’d let anyone know. It’s second nature; hardcore-born and anarchy-server-raised, he involuntarily shies away from most forms of centralized authority. Illogical, certainly, but he’s comfortable in the knowledge that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and he’s seen enough examples of _that_ to have the sense to distrust people with a hold over others, regardless of their position in a world.

“Hit me,” he says bracingly.

Unfortunately, it’s worse than he expected.

It’s not the telling itself that’s bad. Dream’s a good storyteller, recounts events with very little of his own biases attached, tells Techno without prevaricating that he shot Tommy to end the war (and what a word to use, _war,_ when all Techno can make of it is a bunch of kids his age trying to put more gravity into their actions and taking it way too far). Techno gets what seems to be a pretty solid rundown of the fight led by his brothers for their newfound country’s independence, the relatively quiet interim, and then an election gone wrong that ended up establishing an out-of-the-blue underdog as president. 

What grinds Techno’s gears is that said underdog has apparently banished two of his brothers and has a tight grip on the third, a clear threat. The whole situation sounds fishy at best; from the look Dream’s got on his face as he twists his glove in his hand, he withheld a lot of the stuff Techno’d have to read between the lines for.

Well, never let it be said Technoblade doesn’t care to pry. “Sounds like a party.”

Dream drops his chin into his hand, propping his elbow on his leg, gaze fixed off in the distance. “Party or not, Tommy did ask for you, so you should probably go find him.”

Bingo. “Speakin’ of Tommy,” Techno drawls, using that especially knowing tone that he knows always gets to Dream, “it’s a little unusual for him to ask for me. I’d’ve expected Wilbur to call first, or heck, even Tubbo. Got anythin’ to say about that?”

Dream’s shoulders hike up to his ears. For a split second, he looks trapped enough for Techno to feel a tiny bit bad about how passive-aggressively he’d phrased his question, but then Dream exhales long and even and replies, “It’s probably better for you to hear it from Tommy.”

From brash, bright, sensible Dream to this: deflective, neutral, careful to the point of distrust. Dream’s someone who lets his emotions play clear as day on his face, and the only thing stopping people from reading him like an open book is the mask and the hood and the netherite axe. There’s a lot here; Techno just needs to dig. “I’d prefer to hear from you first, Dream. World owner and everythin’, y’know? Fresh perspective.”

Dream answers immediately, voice impassive: “You don’t want to hear this from me. It’s personal. _Family_ personal.”

Oh, this is new, and something Techno absolutely did not want to hear. When things get close to home Techno struggles to stay in the middle ground, the place he’s most comfortable in. Things are never black and white but at least from an uninvolved third-party standpoint, Techno can observe and draw his own conclusions free of peer pressure. People can say what they like about Techno and his outward emotionlessness, he actually does give a shit, thank you so very much, and he can tell himself sternly that the neutral standpoint is always the most bias-free all he wants, he’s still going to find himself leaning toward whatever side his family is on and think deep down that they’re in the right. It was a weird cognitive dissonance to experience SMP Earth, everyone on different sides, the lightheartedness that came with meaningless wars and alliances that came and went in minutes. 

“...Great,” says Techno finally, keeping his expression as unreadable as possible. “Would still be nice to get the bad news from someone who’s not as involved.”

Bad wording. Techno knows as soon as he says it that Dream didn’t like hearing that; his head snaps to Techno and he crosses his arms over his stomach and he bites his lip hard enough to break skin. He watches as Dream swears quietly and brings up a hand to his mouth, stares down at the thin rivulet of blood over his fingers, and cringes. 

“Dream,” begins Techno hesitantly, intending to apologize.

“Don’t,” says Dream instantly, shutting him down, wiping the blood away on his pants. “It’s whatever. You’re right. You should know before... before you see it for yourself.” He takes a deep breath and sighs, “Wilbur isn’t... _right_... right now.”

Techno stares. “What does that even _mean.”_

“He’s, ah. It’s - L’Manberg has been everything to them. Tommy and Wilbur both. They built it from the ground up. And they got through most everything with it intact.” Dream’s voice gets faraway. “I’m not positive. I’m still trying to figure it out. For right now, what you should know is that Wilbur has - has gone mad. A little. Tommy said more about it, but after I saw it for myself I - ” his knuckles go white on his sleeve, “ - I, um. Tommy said a lot about snapping. Violent outbursts. Times when he’d suddenly cuss out random people, things like that.”

“I don’t even...” Wilbur with the kind smiles and round glasses, Wilbur braiding Techno’s hair for him every day without fail, Wilbur reading to him before bed and stumbling over the words, Wilbur inevitably crying when Techno thrashed him in spars, Wilbur making flower crowns for Phil and Tubbo and Tommy and Techno, Wilbur and his gentle, gentle disposition. “Dream, that’s not my brother.”

Dream’s voice wavers almost imperceptibly when he responds, “I know.”

_“Techno!!”_

Both of their heads whip around. Techno scrambles to his feet when he sees a scarlet flash amongst the stripes of tree trunks, weaving around the oaks with practiced ease. He hikes his pack higher on his shoulder when he finally makes out Tommy’s white-blond head popping up between two taller trees, waving his arm frantically. “Techno, over here!” he hollers.

Techno feels a deep, cool relief wash over him when he sees Tommy - Dream’s words had knocked on a door Techno hadn’t opened in years, that creeping awareness that his brothers didn’t have his fight or his skill, that one day he might check the news and find familiar names in the obituaries. Tommy looks none the worse for wear from three chunks away, which means no major injuries, at least on his arms and face. 

Tommy screeches insistently, _“Techno!_ Move your arse already!”

“You’re givin’ away our position, you knucklehead!” Techno calls back, unable to help the faint fondness that threads its way through his voice. Loud, unapologetic, incredibly annoying yet amazingly endearing; that’s his little brother.

“Go on,” says Dream, and when Techno glances over to him Dream smiles - wider this time, not just all teeth, this one’s real and Techno can tell - and gives him a weird sort of half-wave, moving his arm from his elbow rather than his wrist, so that it looks like he’s pantomiming pulling a blanket over Techno and Tommy. Through what sounds like gritted teeth: “And keep an eye out; we’re close to Schlatt’s L’Manberg.”

Techno doesn’t need to be told twice; he nods and offers a two-fingered salute and sprints off amidst Tommy’s various colorful swears and greetings.

It takes him longer than usual to get his bearings, if only because it’s darker in the forest than he anticipated - for autumn, the trees’ leaves are still full and throw everything beneath their canopy into deep shadow - and while Tommy’s voice is coming in loud and clear, he can’t really make him out. Once or twice they skirt way too close to open area for comfort, close enough to see some squat gray buildings and a geometric quartz mansion the next two hills over, and at one point they nearly run into HBomb, of all people, but he miraculously doesn’t notice them almost bowl him over and they peel away from what seems to be the borders of L’Manberg after that.

When they reach a large lake, an oak door just barely visible crammed into the slope of a low hill beside it, Techno stretches and drops his pack and runs his hand through his admittedly very sweaty hair. When it’s just him, he keeps it in a ponytail - it’s out of his face and it’s time-efficient - but if he thinks about it hard enough, he can feel a tiny, childish glimmer of anticipation somewhere deep down about seeing Wilbur again, who always did Techno’s signature braid for him without fail. Musician’s clever fingers, or something like that, probably.

He hears Tommy open and close the door with a flippant “See you inside, big T,” so he assumes he’ll be left alone for a bit. He sighs, starts to run through his loaded conversation with Dream from the top as he dips his fingers into the lake, then blinks in shock down at his hands.

He can’t see them.

Wait, that’s a lie. He can see ash-gray wisps coming off of where he knows his hands to be, and a closer look confirms his initial suspicion of invisibility potions. Judging by the frequency of particle effect production and the opacity of the particles themselves Techno guesses it’s an eight-minute invis rather than three. 

Techno hadn’t had any invis pots on him. 

“What,” he mutters to himself, uncorking one of his flasks of milk and taking a quick swig. Immediately, the effect starts to ebb, and in a few seconds Techno can see his hands. He slaps himself on the head with it; that’s why he couldn’t see Tommy when they were booking it through the woods earlier, stupid.

The logical conclusion would be that Tommy had thrown the invisibility, but the problem is, Techno seriously doubts Wilbur and Tommy have managed to get any kind of brewing setup down in their little rabbit hole, and besides that, Techno already couldn’t see Tommy when he began to run toward the forest, so presumably, they were already under the potion effect. What other opportunities would there have been for them to -

Techno closes his eyes and almost slaps himself again. Of course.

Phil’s a good minor god. The best, in Techno’s humble opinion. He’s the valiant, reasonable type, and even among minor gods his power is unprecedented - after all, SMP Earth was the biggest world ever created by a minor god to date, and Phil was only laid up for a day or two. Unheard of. There were times when Techno would stumble home injured after picking a fight with something that way outclassed him and Phil was there, careful, his hand ghosting over whatever wounds Techno was sporting, a healing effect draped over him. Phil wasn’t shy about doling out information about minor gods, either; Techno knows every minor god is different in terms of strengths and weaknesses, that what comes easy as breathing for one minor god might be like pulling teeth for another, that minor gods can control any aspect of a world of their creation. Techno’s education was mired in mythology.

Techno knows Dream. Understands a bit better, now, where he’s coming from.

Heading down into the belly of the beast, where he wonders if he’ll find the person who braids his hair or a stranger, Techno thinks, just a bit relieved, that it’s a good thing they’ve got a god on their side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> vague smp spoilers in end notes!!!!!
> 
> im in pain and i am pogging the fuck through it is what im doin i dont know canon i do not see


	19. bad (run devil run)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bad trusts Dream, perhaps against his better judgement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holy fuck we’re just four chapters or so out that’s so wild hhh
> 
> god this chapter made me so excited for future projects on young god. a drabble series is definitely on the table there ;)

Bad’s not surprised when he opens the door and sees Dream; he scoots aside and lets him in without a word, checks outside perfunctorily for any stalkers, and locks the door before following Dream to the living room. Trotting behind him, Bad looks Dream over surreptitiously, force of habit from days long past: injuries, illness, any kind of emotional burden that curls his shoulders down. Dream came to him just a week past, after all - halfway into a panic attack, his hands and his shirt and his face all bloody, sending Bad back ten years to the day Dream came back with red smeared all over his small freckled face and wouldn’t let anybody but Sapnap see the wound that Sapnap told Bad and Sam later would scar for sure. It wasn’t anything of that caliber last week, just a nosebleed, but the way Dream couldn’t stop shaking even after he left didn’t sit well with Bad at all. 

It seems fine now, though. No blood as far as Bad can see. If it weren’t for the obvious tension, Dream’s razor-fine focus, Bad could trick himself into thinking it’s just another afternoon, the sun shining, no war, no constant anxiety, no cream-colored invitation limned in ink and rose gold sitting on the nightstand.

Skeppy’s sitting in the armchair beside the coffee table, staring into the fireplace with a pensive grimace that hasn’t left his face all morning. When he spots Dream and Bad, though, his expression morphs to one of careful blankness and he tactfully takes his leave, squeezing Bad’s shoulder as he passes him.

“You don’t have to leave whenever I visit,” says Dream abruptly, and Skeppy’s hand stills on Bad’s arm.

“I don’t,” agrees Skeppy, “but you two deserve some space, I think, and at any rate I can talk to you whenever you stay for dinner.” He winks at Bad as he escapes to the second floor, and Bad blesses every old god in existence ever that his best friend’s a genius, trying to get Dream to stay longer rather than run himself ragged out there. At least they can make some sort of safe space for him, when they both know for a fact he’s not staying in his base anymore and no one can tell what he’s doing or where he is at any given point.

Dream seats himself on the arm of the sofa opposite Skeppy’s armchair, one leg folded and the other planted on the floor. Bad smiles despite himself - Dream never sat normally in chairs, even as a kid, always ready to fly out of his seat - and plops himself down beside him on the sofa itself, crossing his legs. They sit in silence for a moment.

“How are you doing, Dream?” Bad asks eventually, shifting so he can look up at him. Small talk feels too inane at this point, but Bad is hanging on to whatever sense of normalcy he can, sue him. 

Dream flashes a sideways smile at Bad, leaning back into the wall the sofa’s shoved up against. “Same old. How about you, how are you doing?” He blows a strand of hair from his face. “And how’s Skeppy? You guys doing okay?”

Bad thinks of the invitation, the anxiety, the side-eyeing and side-stepping everyone he meets in the street is doing.

“It’s... We’re doing pretty well,” he says, lying through his teeth. “Farms are a little dry this year, but nothing we can’t handle. We found a diamond vein a few days ago! That’s good. Um... we’ve been keeping ourselves busy.” The elaborations, at least, aren’t fake. Bad’s always been good at looking at the brighter aspect of things, sticking to the side of the fence where the grass is greener, making sunshine for himself when there’s little to be seen naturally. It’s what made him so good at running their little family unit when they were younger - Bad may be easy-born but there were monsters out there nonetheless, and during times when hunger was a bitter companion and the nights stretched too long and the zombies were clawing at the door, too weak to break it down but loud enough to dash any chance at sleep, Bad cranked up his innate ceaseless optimism, and most times, he could lull his friends to sleep, or at the very least lift their moods. 

Positivity is his thing. That’s what he’s good at, so he capitalized on it. 

“Lying by omission’s still lying, Bad,” says Dream, breaking into Bad’s musings without a trace of accusation in his voice, perfectly matter-of-fact.

Bad wrinkles his nose at Dream anyway. “I haven’t left anything out,” he says. 

“Yes, you have.” Dream taps out a cadence on his knee. “You got invited to the Manberg Festival, didn’t you?”

Bad cringes. Of course Dream knows about the invitation. It might just be a good guess, of course, seeing as Schlatt invited people regardless of their territorial leanings, though whether that was intentional or not is an entirely different debate. It figures, he supposes, that Dream would want to talk about it; when all’s said and done this whole place is still Dream’s world, and it’s still well and truly muffined up now. 

“Yeah,” Bad admits, since if Dream knows there’s not really a point in avoiding the topic. “I think everyone did, to be honest.”

Dream’s lips quirk at that. “Not me,” he says, counting off on his fingers. “And not Wilbur and Tommy.”

Tommy and Wilbur were a given, but - “You, too?” asks Bad, surprised. “He doesn’t like Niki, but she got an invitation.”

“The point isn’t really who’s invited, it’s who’s _not._ Those people are lined up to be public enemy number one once the festival’s over.” Bad watches as Dream runs his fingers through his hood reflexively. “And after we’re out of the picture, Schlatt’s gonna clean out every country on this server - L’Manberg _and_ the Dream SMP.”

Bad hates the way Dream says it, all clinical, like it’s not his world that Bad knows he spent weeks nitpicking over with whatever minor god he asked a favor from, like it’s not his world that he established so that he could make a place for the people he’s so fond of. An oasis, a safe haven. 

Turned into this. 

“I should show you something,” Bad blurts, reaches out and puts his hand on Dream’s arm; anything to stop Dream from getting that flat, removed set to his mouth, the one that reminds Bad his friend is the one that makes the tough calls, the one who weighs the end versus the means, the one who can bring a raid to its knees with his own blood and shoot a child through the heart without a moment’s hesitation. Bad thinks it’s physically impossible for him to be afraid of Dream, but that doesn’t mean he’s not aware that the person he practically raised is perfectly capable of doing both great and terrible things. Isn’t everyone?

“Here, follow me.” Bad hops off the sofa and grabs Dream’s hand, taking Dream’s little noise of surprise in stride as he pulls Dream off toward the center of his and Skeppy’s mansion. For its vastness and obvious luxury, it’s homey; there are little framed pictures on the hall tables and the walls of Skeppy posing in front of the half-built mansion, Bad spreading out a blanket for a picnic, Ant waving his arms wildly framed by a sunset, Callahan half-obscured by the swipe of Alyssa’s hair as their boat flips under them, Dream nearly crying mid-hiccup with Bad and Skeppy on either side of him, Bad frantically thumping him on the back and Skeppy obviously trying to scare the hiccups away. Snapshots of a life Bad built here before everything turned upside down, a life Bad wants desperately to preserve, one that he wants to revive.

Dream trails his free hand over the photos as they walk by. He says nothing.

Finally, Bad stops in front of the stairway to the obsidian-lined vault he and Skeppy made as soon as they’d mapped out the floor plans. Toes the door open gingerly, checks to make sure all the torches remain clear of any flammable objects, and leads Dream down into the heart of the house.

“Bad,” says Dream, more curious than uneasy, scanning the dark walls and uneven cobblestone steps, “what is this?”

Bad chooses his words carefully as he explains, “Me and Skeppy thought it would be good to have a way out, when we first made the house. It’s not that we ever expected things to go south! It’s just... paranoia? Well, being prepared for every situation, at least. The vault is for valuables - minerals, non-perishables, weaponry.” They reach the bottom step and Bad indicates with a flourish the two chunks of chests and living space he and Skeppy had cleared out. It’s more functional than stylish - several chests are stacked up wrong, and the neon-pink carpet looks garish against the obsidian and stone bricks - but it’s much better than nothing. Dream whistles when he sees it.

“Apocalypse-prepping?” he asks, fondly amused, a tone Bad realizes with a quiet and sudden sort of melancholy he hasn’t heard in ages. 

“Something like that,” he replies, peeking in a nearby chest to check its contents and satisfied by the redstone and glowstone he finds in neat parcels within. “But this actually isn’t what I wanted to show you.”

“I don’t think I can get any more impressed, Bad, you might have to just invite me over again tomorrow.”

Score! “Maybe I will,” Bad says primly. “Still, I thought you should know that we have this.”

He leads them toward a hatch in the middle of the vault, obscured by the tacky carpet (which Bad would replace, but he thinks it adds personality, and Skeppy hasn’t complained). He shifts the carpet aside, pulls the birch trapdoor open (“What?! Dude!”), and makes his way down the ladder beneath it.

“I feel like this is how people get murdered,” comments Dream with only a little wariness as he follows Bad into the hole.

“I promise I won’t murder you,” says Bad with as much solemnity as he can muster. Dream cackles at that.

“But seriously, where does this lead to? Why do you have so many... oh.” 

Bad smiles despite himself when Dream lands beside him at the base of the ladder and peers down the mined-out corridor that stretches out into the distance before them in a strip-mine fashion. Torches line the wall on either side; it’s impossible to see where the tunnel ends. There are chests to either side, one with shields and the other with more torches; theoretically, one could walk forever. It took Bad and Skeppy almost a full week to set this up, but Bad doesn't regret a second of it.

Dream leans his shoulder against the wall. “Bad,” he begins, then doesn’t pick up his sentence again, staring down the tunnel. The emotion has sapped from his voice.

Bad doesn’t really need to explain - he suspects Dream knew instantly what the tunnel was meant for the moment he checked the contents of the chests - but he says anyway, for brevity, “It’s an escape route. This is newer than the vault. Things were getting... things are a little dicey up there, and I figured it’s always better to be safe than sorry.”

“How long does it go for?”

“Probably until it hits the sea. It’s too close to the surface after you walk for around forty blocks because the house is on a hill, but... it’s better than nothing.” Bad watches Dream’s face carefully as he talks, very conscious of the fact that Dream might take this in a really bad way; it might be seen as a slight to him, an insult to the way he handled his world, a condemnation of how things have played out. It wasn’t intended to be; Bad’s a realist for all that’s he’s optimistic, and he knows that the smart thing to do is have a way out.

Dream’s reaction, though, is far from what Bad predicted: he sighs and tilts his head back into the rungs of the ladder and says with far too much weariness in his voice for Bad’s liking, “How did things get to this point, Bad?”

Bad says immediately, “Part of it is definitely on you, Dream,” never one to cut corners with his friend. He pats Dream’s hand kindly when he winces in response and continues, “I’m not saying it’s your fault, but I am saying you’re responsible for some things that led to other things that led to here. Does that make sense? Like, the L’Manberg Independence War. You could’ve let it go, like you let everything before that go. You didn’t.” Bad can’t help the slight reproach that creeps into his tone when he says that; it wasn’t just the L’Manbergians who saw Dream’s handling of the war as kind of problematic. “I get that you were trying to play along with the kids. I get that you wanted something big. But I really feel like that wasn’t the move.”

Dream, to his credit, takes the criticism well. “I know,” he says, voice purposefully blank. 

“I know you know.” Bad looks over his friend for a moment, trying to see the tyrant Tommy saw, trying to see the warmonger Wilbur saw, trying to see the collared monster Schlatt saw.

All he can see is Dream, gaze fixed toward the far end of the tunnel where it abruptly twists into a 90-degree turn, his hand placed firmly on the wall, his weight leaned against it, murmuring to himself. His freckles are stark and there are small twigs snarled in his hair and his cheekbones are sharper under his skin than Bad remembers them being.

“We live and learn,” he says, quieter, pulling a leaf out of a curl of Dream’s hair, getting Dream’s attention. Softens his voice as far as it’ll go as he gently squeezes Dream’s hand and acknowledges, “You’re only human.”

It was meant to be an apology. An assurance. A mercy.

Instead, Dream’s face crumples, and he snatches his hand from Bad’s as though burned. Confused, Bad reaches for him, but Dream shakes his head jerkily and scampers up the ladder with that preternatural speed of his and heaves himself out of the hole before Bad can shake himself from the stunned silence he’d fallen into. By the time the words unstick from his throat, Dream’s light footsteps are echoing up toward the entrance to the vault. When Bad pulls himself out of the escape tunnel, the doors swing shut with a little sigh.

Bad almost chases Dream to apologize for - for something. He doesn’t know what he said that set Dream off like that - thought he knew most of the things that made Dream want to run like the wind and not look back, thought he knew how to modulate himself. He genuinely has no clue what it is he said or did that made Dream react that violently, though, and after a moment, he lets it go ruefully. It feels, sometimes, like Dream never gets to run away from things, not like people with less responsibility do; every time Dream looks around he’s staring at the consequences of his actions. How shackling, how damning must that feel?

Bad scrubs his hands through his hair, reprimands himself for scaring Dream off, and trudges off toward the stairs. He’ll tell Skeppy Dream probably won’t be at dinner.

Apparently, a horde of creepers comes by that night, a part of the uptick in visits made by hostile mobs in the Dream SMP lately, because the morning after, when Bad squints out at the backyard, there’s a massive crater that clearly eats straight through the escape tunnel. It sours Bad’s mood enough that Skeppy doesn’t even let him into the kitchen until he fixes “whatever it is that’s making you put out _rancid_ vibes.” So it is that Bad traipses out into the plains that stretch for chunks behind the mansion with several stacks of dirt and cobblestone in hand, grumbling about the sturdiness, or lack thereof, of their escape route and planning on a mining excursion for more obsidian after the mess is cleaned up.

When he reaches the edge of the pit, though, he gasps and drops his pack and scrambles closer, peering in, not believing his eyes.

“No way,” he whispers.

The little three-by-two tunnel, made only of stone, is completely untouched despite the rubble surrounding it. When Bad nudges the walls with his pick, there’s not a single crack. The explosion looks like it went around the tunnel itself, destroying the dirt and untouched rock around but not the escape route. It’s unfathomable.

Since the whole point of a secret tunnel is to make sure it’s _secret_ , Bad does fill up the crater, and plans to plant some tall grass there once some grass grows over to make it look less scruffy, but as he heads back in, his thoughts remain fixated on the newfound indestructibility of the tunnel. Bad accidentally hit the stone multiple times while filling the dirt in around in, but the pick couldn’t chip it, not even a little bit. The fact that an explosion couldn’t get it either means it’s incombustible, as well. What the muffin.

Apropos of nothing, Bad thinks of Dream murmuring to the walls, Dream with his hand on the chest. Dream, the rubble, the consequences of his actions; Dream choking on his laughter in a picture frame in the living room.

The Metaphor, sitting unburned and surrounded by a ring of ash in front of the Community House, claimed by Tommy to be nonflammable despite his best efforts. Purpled’s UFO, now largely abandoned, used frequently for Fire Aspect target practice.

Bad leans back onto his heels, then sits down heavily, because he doesn’t trust his legs to keep him upright. _Dream, paper-pale, his face a crime scene, and Bad can’t tell if he’s eleven or twenty-one with how the images overlap; Dream who came to Bad where he almost always hides alone and asked him for help._

The invitation, cream and rose gold and ink, looming like a death sentence on the nightstand.

Everything is falling into place, or maybe it’s falling apart. Bad doesn’t know. Bad can’t say.

The festival is a week away.

Bad can’t shake the feeling that something awful is going to happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in this episode of chrys made the spacing between events a little weird again: i kept saying three weeks between election night and techno arriving, not realizing in my incredibly smooth brain that the festival happened exactly three weeks after the election. i’m going to pretend like i know what time is and say there was a four week buffer period between the election and the festival uhhh yeah ((two thumbs up))
> 
> concept: ever since skeppy chapter, dream, skeppy, and bad have dinner together every so often and gossip with dessert afterwards. is there any image nearly as powerful as three slightly tipsy twenty-something-year-olds very sloppily painting one another’s nails and complaining about the drop rates on their enchanted pickaxes


	20. tubbo (cadmean victory)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What say the sacrificial lamb?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: mentions of alcoholism, fixation on death (this chapter's a bit heavy)
> 
> endgame endgame endgame!!

Tubbo can count on one hand how many times he’s died before. Even before joining Dream’s world, he lived a relatively sheltered life; Tubbo was Phil’s third lost boy, adopted early enough that he doesn’t remember a time without three brothers and a father, and the only time he’d died under Phil’s watchful eye was during a mining excursion where Tubbo hadn’t stuck close enough to the rest of the pack and had slipped and fallen down a ravine. Tubbo only remembers the blind panic as the cave walls blurred past him and a single moment of clarity when he heard some crucial bone in his neck snap against the earth and he woke up in bed with a shriek of surprise. It was over in less than ten seconds.

Phil had burst into his bedroom, frantic, hair undone, hat nowhere to be found, his haori flaring out into wings; he’d tripped over the chest Tubbo left in front of the doorway in his haste to get to Tubbo’s side and had pulled Tubbo into a desperate hug, and Tubbo still remembers the soft down of Phil’s feathers against the side of his face as Phil whispered blessings to every old god in existence that he’d moved the family into a normal world.

Tubbo was young, then, and still frightened of death. Phil’s a good teacher, and being hardcore-born, he drilled it into all of their heads that death, regardless of the certainty of respawn, was never something to be sought after nor taken lightly. Of course, Tubbo’d lost most of that fear by the time he hit his teens - what’s the point of respawn if you just stay cooped up all day, afraid of the world outside? - but though he’s broken his neck, been shot by a skeleton, and on one memorable occasion was incinerated in a wayward pool of lava, he’s never been killed by another person.

He thinks that’s what’s going to happen soon.

He hasn’t been caught by Schlatt, which is a miracle on its own; even if the man’s more full of drink than his liquor cabinet he’s sharp as a sword and Tubbo knows better than to let his guard down around him. Quackity knows too; Tubbo thinks Quackity was blinded by their prior acquaintanceship at the beginning, has pushed it aside now, grimly focused on making sure Schlatt doesn’t keel over from alcohol poisoning or some inebriated tumble down a flight of stairs. Fundy keeps to himself for the most part, coming only when called, sequestered in his own house in the heart of Manberg instead of staying in the quarters available to him in the White House. Tubbo sometimes feels like Fundy might not trust him. That’s probably a good thing. Tubbo doesn’t trust himself.

Wilbur is an entirely different can of worms. Where Tubbo has no context within which to frame the Manbergian president other than a burning flag and an office lined by empty bottles, the hesitant stories Quackity tells of board games and potion chicken and a keen eye for business that are a far cry from the wreck in power now, Tubbo knows Wilbur, has known him for years, has woken up in the morning and locked Wilbur out of the bathroom so he can brush his teeth in peace, has helped Tommy trip Wilbur into a canyon before and gotten pushed into a cactus in retaliation. Tubbo has loved Wilbur. Wilbur's loved Tubbo. 

Tubbo honestly can’t tell whether any of that love is left.

If Tommy’s to be believed, it wasn’t that bad at first. Snippy one moment, bone-deep-tired the next, a raging fire after, all reasonable reactions to being thrown out of the country you fought and died for. What Tubbo saw when he ducked in every once in a while early on were probably the better days; Will was haggard but would light up vaguely, give him a noogie with none of the vigor but all of the feeling, and ask him how things were going in L’Manberg. 

Tubbo wasn’t there when Dream allegedly visited. He thought Dream had done something to Wilbur for how drastic the change was; when he went to Pogtopia two days later, Will had laughed gleefully and clapped Tubbo on the back and dug his fingers into Tubbo’s arms and asked him how Schlatt was doing and there was no depth to his eyes, just flat fire, something hollow and hateful that scared Tubbo more than he’d like to admit. It’s only after he sits down with Tommy that he hears about the whole fiasco, and just like Tommy, he can’t make heads or tails of it - Tommy’s halting description of the ravine going breathless, Will’s breakdown, Dream bleeding into his hands. The whole situation is way too fishy for Tubbo’s liking, from Wilbur’s descent into madness (“Don’t call it that, Tubbo!” “That’s what it _is_ , Tommy.”) to the obvious difference between the Schlatt Quackity recalls and the Schlatt drinking himself to death in office. 

And Tubbo’s stuck between two maniacs and a hard place.

It’s not so much death itself he’s afraid of as it is the lead-up to it. Tubbo feels like he’s hanging by a thread no matter where he goes now - on one hand there’s Schlatt, breathing down his neck at every cabinet meeting, his hand like the blade of a guillotine on Tubbo’s shoulder, and on the other there’s Wilbur, smiling the way a face freezes in rigor mortis, watching Tubbo how a spider watches its prey. Lately, the only place Tubbo doesn’t feel a shroud of dread is on his way back and forth between Manberg and Pogtopia, and if that’s not just sad, he doesn’t know what is. 

It’s once he starts dreaming about it that it gets really bad. He locks his door at night because it’s stupid but he doesn’t think Schlatt as he is right now is above creeping in and setting his room on fire. He stops dropping by Pogtopia so often because he can still picture the look on Wilbur’s face when he wakes up after being strangled by him in his sleep.

Tommy’s definitely noticed how off Tubbo is lately, tripping around like he’s half-awake, but Tubbo’s been able to play it off as him being tired by preparations for the festival. It’s not really a lie; he can see the half-contained rage in the faces of some of his fellow citizens, the all-consuming exhaustion that weighs others down. None of them are operating at one hundred percent to put the festival together, a crowd of dead people walking. Niki hasn’t dyed her hair in ages. Fundy’s going grey at an alarming rate. George doesn’t leave his house. HBomb breaks windows in fits of spite. Purpled’s not sleeping. Ponk buries three cats. Quackity cries after Schlatt passes out at his desk for the sixth time that week. Sapnap sets two buildings on fire. Jack clears away the tatters of a flag long gone. Karl’s plants wilt from neglect. Tubbo thinks Manberg might not survive the festival. 

Tubbo thinks _he_ might not survive the festival, either.

It really starts to eat away at him. They’re only three days out from the big event and Tubbo’s wound tighter than a spring, keeps seeing flashes of death around every corner wearing the faces of a person he wanted to call a friend and a person who’s been his brother for fifteen years, and it’s completely unreasonable and Tubbo knows it’s unreasonable but he’s so on-edge that when he hears a rustle in the bushes around him on his way back to Manberg from an impromptu Pogtopia visit he doesn’t even think before pulling out his shield and ducking behind it with an aborted squeak of terror. As soon as he does, he regrets it - he should have taken the split second to grab his sword instead of his shield, now he’s got to defend instead of scaring whoever or whatever it is away, idiot - but fingers curl gently over the top of the shield and Tubbo finds himself blinking up into a white, impassive face.

“Oh,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. “Hello, Dream.”

Dream doesn’t say anything. Tubbo doesn’t drop his shield. As welcome as the sight is, Tubbo is fully aware that no one knows where Dream stands now and Tubbo might just be staring into the face of his demise.

There are loads of things Tubbo could say to break the silence that swells like an infected wound between them. “You’ve killed Tommy before,” maybe, or “I wish I’d never come here - that’s a lie,” or “Everything’s gone to shit,” or even a nice “How’s your day been?” that’s only a little bit backhanded. It’s good to see Dream for the familiarity of him, and there are plenty of fond memories there - MCCs, building the holy land, Dream playing along soberly as Tubbo walked Fundy through the steps of a successful exorcism - but Tubbo hasn’t held a proper conversation with Dream for what must be nearly a month now. He doesn’t think he’s actually _seen_ Dream for nearly a month either, not even glimpses of him. The last time he can recall seeing Dream is the election night with his back to the podium, far enough into the shadow of a nearby building that Tubbo could’ve missed him if he hadn’t been looking, Fundy darting over to hold Dream’s hand, Sapnap throwing himself into Dream’s arms, Ponk patting Dream’s shoulder. Tubbo had turned away then, because it felt like he was watching something buckle, watching something break.

Ultimately, what rises to his lips is, “It’s been a while.”

It’s the understatement of the century, but Dream’s expression doesn’t change. His hand remains loosely on the shield, and Tubbo doesn’t move away even though every reasonable voice in his head is yelling at him to back off because Dream is easily the most dangerous person on this server right now, bar Techno. 

Tubbo feels some ridiculous urge to keep the one-sided conversation going that might have something to do with the fact that it’s the most normal conversation he’s held in ages, excluding his talks with Tommy, which are still loaded. “I’m just sticking with, er, with Wilbur and Tommy,” he offers, thinking quickly to Tommy’s knuckles white on a crossbow so enchanted it thrummed when Tubbo put his hand on it. “Acting as a spy for Pogtopia, y’know?”

Dream draws his hand away from the shield. Tubbo decides to take that as a go-ahead.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds! It’s... it’s fun! It has its fun moments. Isn’t being a spy on everybody’s bucket list at some point?” Tubbo knots his fingers together, firmly herding his thoughts away from _“My right-hand man, Tubbo! Loyal to the presidency and to Manberg,”_ and _“Keep an eye on ol’ Fundy for me, won’tcha, bucko?”_ and _“Manberg rose from the ashes of corruption and desolation - this crown has your name on it, Tubbo,”_ and adds, forcing his voice not to waver, “Schlatt’ll fuckin’ die at some point, I think, for how much he’s drinking, and Wilbur can take back the presidency, and we can... we can build up the walls again at that point, I think! And put up our flag, and make colorful roofs again, and fix the gardens, and Wilbur will start smiling again, and - and Tommy can stop thinking about fighting, and I won’t have to - I won't have to spy... I... and - and we’ll... we’ll...”

The words trail off into the quiet forest. Tubbo’s blinking down at his hands, palms up, and they’re wet. Why are they... why is he...

“I’m crying,” he says stupidly, still staring at his hands all slick with tears, and then he brings them to his face and runs his sleeves into his eyes and his legs can’t hold him up so he sinks into a crouch, chest to his knees, and a rusty, cobwebbed sob falls out from somewhere inside him and rolls into the grass at his feet like a suffocating fish out of water.

It’s not the kind of loud, furious crying that Tommy does. It’s not cathartic at all. It feels like the entire world’s compressing onto his shoulders, like some horribly undeniable truth has presented itself to him - painting a beautiful picture of a L’Manberg Tubbo thought he could rebuild by being a sacrificial lamb, mapping out a portrait of a smiley Wilbur and a lighthearted Tommy and an earnest Tubbo, it’s hit him like the creeping cold of the wither effect that that doesn’t exist anymore. It can’t, not like this. All those grey-haired, grey-faced people curled up in their homes back in Manberg can’t take this all-encompassing, devastating grief back; all of them are mourning for something they all contributed to killing with a poisoned knife. Tubbo doesn’t know why he thought that his death would be the killing blow to the cold conflict that’s brewing under the server’s skin - just because it’s earth-shattering to him doesn’t mean it’ll shake the person ordering him dead, probably Schlatt - because he can see so clearly now that it won’t do a shred of good, and he’ll die anyway, and the knife they all had a hand in driving into the heart of the Dream SMP has run its toxins too deep into the veins of Dream’s beautiful little world (all rolling hills and endless fields and friendly faces). The realization is jarring, icy cold as the tears Tubbo can distantly feel rolling down his cheeks, collecting in his hands; it feels like he’s shattering into a million tiny aching shards, like a window, like a mirror, some vague glass reflection that always comes back, a million tiny aching cuts as he breathes stutteringly through hiccups.

The grass Tubbo can just barely make out through his fingers parts under dark boots. The rest of Dream follows, one long green smear, as he kneels before Tubbo.

Dream reaches out, careful, slow, so that Tubbo can see his movements; he takes Tubbo’s hands, shiny with tears, and presses his forehead to them, his hair tangling in Tubbo’s fingertips. It’s dead silent in the forest, and Tubbo can hear with perfect clarity Dream’s drawn-out sigh, tremulous, like his heart is breaking.

And through the thick fog of hysteria that had stampeded through Tubbo just moments ago there comes a ray of calmness, of peacefulness, clearing away the sudden and desperate terror. Tubbo breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth, and it doesn’t feel so much like his ribs are going to cave in, or that Wilbur is going to cut his throat, or that Schlatt is going to shoot him through the heart. The roaring wave of fear has crested and now it’s dying down, the tide rushing out. A serenity that Tubbo hasn’t felt for weeks sinks into him now.

Dream stands abruptly, stumbles over his own feet as Tubbo looks up at him. His stance has buckled, his shoulders drawn in, and he pushes his hands through his hair, visibly gathering himself.

“Dream?” Tubbo asks uncertainly. He’s stuffy from the crying but otherwise he wouldn’t recognize his own voice for its relative steadiness. “Are you - ”

Dream, with hands that shake, grips Tubbo by the shoulders and hovers for a second, his scrutiny so intense Tubbo quails momentarily. A dozen emotions flicker by the portion of Dream’s face Tubbo can see, but before he can say a word, there’s the snap of a branch somewhere nearby. Dream’s head whips up, like a startled wild animal; he pushes away from Tubbo just as abruptly as he’d grabbed him and bolts into the surrounding forest, scaling a tree and vanishing into the leaves in the time it takes for Tubbo to blink.

Tubbo almost calls after him. He’s saying, “Dre - ”, concerned, when a hand collides with his back and he staggers forward. Tubbo jerks around and runs face-first into a cloud of alcohol fumes.

“Hey! Tubbo!” crows Schlatt, so joyous that it’s plastic. Tubbo feels his face go stony as Schlatt leans in and observes, “Your face... all splotchy. S’mthin’. You been cryin’?”

“Allergies,” Tubbo says glibly. “Awful weather, honestly. Does Quackity know where you are, Mr. President?”

“He don’t fuckin’ need to... all under control,” sputters Schlatt. 

His timing’s too good. Tubbo knows how cunning the man before him is, for all that he’s probably staring down an eternity of kidney disease. Dream, beating it as soon as he heard signs of life. The newfound assurance Tubbo can feel anchoring him down where he’d only felt a pool of despair before. There’s fear, certainly; he wouldn’t be Phil’s son if he weren’t afraid of death. But it’s like there’s something whispering to him that everything will be fine, and that death will make a difference, and he might not even have to, to believe in his brothers, to believe that he can keep moving. He’s still afraid, but...

“Of course.” The Manbergian president’s probably too drunk to hear the thread of contempt in Tubbo’s voice. “Let’s get you back to the White House, shall we?”

And if Schlatt’s gaze is a little too sharp, and Tubbo’s empty secretarial smile is steelier than usual, neither of them say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow first chapter where dream has not said a SINGLE word
> 
> this chapter was a DOOZY. that massive paragraph i wrote in the middle about tubbo realising the dream smp's essentially fucked was written in a daze; i think in terms of emotional impact that's one of the strongest things i've written thus far hh


	21. george (lanterns burn low)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A moment in the night; George is visited by a specter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: depressive behavior (at least, it could be construed as such; it’s mainly apathy and avoiding his friends/positive human contact but as i was writing it i realised it was a bit depression-coded. it’s not particularly explicit which is why this isn’t a trigger warning but. yeah)
> 
> (ex) king gogy is here!!

George _hates_ being caught up in conflict. He’s always the mediator between Dream and Sapnap, the first to drop his blade when Dream gives on manhunts, and people might think he’s soft for it but when he brought it up once, even before Dream had wanted a world for them, Sapnap had huffed exasperatedly at him and punched him in the arm and told him not to be stupid, so he supposes it’s not a bad thing. 

It was less of an issue in Dream’s world, for the most part. George isn’t the type to settle feuds with blood anyway, and Dream always kept an eye on any mishaps in case someone decided to take things south. Their friends rarely chose violence to settle matters. All in all, it had been going swimmingly. Dream’s face was always sun-bright. George didn’t feel like he had to pick up a sword and fight for one side or another when it always takes so much time for him to sift through the details and uncover the core of each argument. 

And then the _damn election_ \- well. 

George agrees to be Quackity’s vice president in good fun. It’s all a lighthearted game, after all - George knows Dream is distancing himself from L’Manberg to keep up appearances, and George likes Quackity well enough, his loud sense of humor and the air of glee he carries with him wherever he goes - and he navigates his way through the debates and political pussyfooting without much problem. It feels sort of cute, to be honest - after a debate gone wrong where someone snipes someone else and then it’s a proper free-for-all, everyone gathers and someone hands out cookies and they all laugh about it, and once, after Wilbur accidentally trips Ponk off the walkway to the courthouse and breaks his leg, Wilbur sprints the five chunks to his house and fetches a regen potion himself and voluntarily walks Ponk everywhere for the next two days as atonement. It doesn’t feel real. When they all shout insults at each other across the courtroom, it’s not serious. When they cross swords whilst crossing borders, it’s not actually a reprimand. There’s no edge to the situation, no teeth. George is enjoying himself, to be quite honest, like it were all some massive bonding exercise. 

He almost misses the main event. He slept through his alarm, and cuts a haphazard figure in his creased suit and half-knotted blue tie, but he’s on the wings of the podium, waiting for Wilbur to declare himself and Tommy president and vice president so that he can discreetly join Quackity’s side for the speech, but then Wilbur goes ashen and George blinks and Wilbur and Tommy are being escorted off, blinks and Schlatt’s looming over the podium with his horns framing his head like a snapped halo, blinks and people are screaming and crying and arrows are being fired and as if through a film of water overhead George hears Wilbur cry out in pain. 

Fundy’s the one who notices him off to the side, blanches, and crosses the stage behind Schlatt and drags George backward, deeper into the wings. When George demands, “Fundy, what - ”, bewildered, Fundy smothers the words with his hand and glances back over his shoulder down into the crowd. What he sees makes his expression tighten. 

“Go home,” he advises George quietly, eyes afire. “Right now. It won’t do you any good to be here. I have to go help the others hunt - hunt down Wilbur and Tommy. I... I have to go see Dream.” He shoves George away from him toward the stage’s exit and takes off for the opposite end exit without looking back, unsheathing his diamond sword as he runs.

Looking back on it, George wonders if he should’ve run to see Dream, too, while he had the chance. It’s wishful thinking; he knows if he’d done that he would’ve drawn a line in the sand that Schlatt wouldn’t have taken kindly to at all, painted a target on his back that he can’t afford to have. Still, as things are now, there’s no way George can see Dream. Hell, he barely even sees Sapnap and Ponk, for all that they’ve also been forcibly integrated into Manberg; Sapnap’s running himself ragged looking after Karl and keeping an eye out for Quackity, and Ponk has taken up the unofficial role of Manberg’s doctor and has no shortage of patients. George doesn’t want to impose, not when they’re both so busy.

Mostly, George sleeps. He doesn’t stop to wonder whether his coping mechanism of choice is healthy or not; he buries all the screeching feelings that writhe up whenever he makes eye contact with a fellow citizen of Manberg deep down into some cavity that has opened up in his chest and makes sure he’s bleary enough from sleeping all the time that he can’t feel the void where he used to be angry about Schlatt, disappointed with Quackity, worried about Tubbo, longing for his best friends. He won’t leave his house for days on end, spends the approximately five hours he’s conscious tending to the plants in his house and going mining, and when the invitation comes George stares at the cream paper for a solid thirty seconds before crumpling it and going to bed.

The day before the festival, Sapnap shows up at his house. George probably would’ve missed him if it weren’t for his best friend literally busting the door down and shouting, “George! Where the fuck are you?!”

George sits bolt upright from where he was staring at the wall from the sofa and yelps, “What the hell!”

Sapnap zeroes in on him, crosses the room in three strides, grabs him by the shoulders. “Dude, are you okay? I haven’t seen you in days! You keep going MIA for, like, weeks!” He gives George a little shake. “I’ve been fucking worried!”

Even in the gloom of the overcast day outside, George can clearly see the shadows under Sapnap’s eyes, the wobble in his mouth, and even through the fog he keeps himself in he can feel a stir of guilt, of remorse. “Sapnap,” he says, then fails to come up with any sort of answer. What’s he supposed to say? _I’m locking myself up so I don’t do anything stupid? What’s the point in going outside if I’m not going to see anyone anyway?_

Sapnap watches him struggle internally for a moment, then sighs and puts his forehead to the back of the sofa and mumbles, “At least you’re safe,” which, okay, George doesn’t love the implication that Sapnap’s other loved ones aren’t safe, but then, most of them are caged in Manberg like the rest of them, so.

George reaches out and passes his hand through Sapnap’s hair and when Sapnap looks up with wide eyes George tells him, “Come on, then, sit down, let’s talk. Unless you’ve got somewhere you have to be?”

Sapnap bites his lip as he glances at the door, a habit he picked up from Dream when they were younger. Reluctantly, he says, “I should be going to see Quackity...” but just as George gives up hope he turns back around and vaults over the sofa to sit by George’s legs and continues, with a ghost of a grin flashing over his face, “but I got five minutes.”

George had been half-hoping Sapnap’s news of the outside world would be a little brighter than what he’d expected, but honestly, it’s worse. Without pausing for breath, Sapnap recounts all the pertinent details of the goings-on in Manberg - the heightened taxes on just Niki (“It’s just such a huge fucking joke, what the fuck is she going to pay them in? L’Manberg didn’t even have taxes in the first place!”), the apparent worsening condition of Schlatt (“Quackity’s been telling me he’s gonna drink himself to death at this rate, and Ponk said so too, it’s pretty bad,”), the halfhearted preparations for the festival (“I mean, he’s put his cabinet in charge of putting shit together, but the way things are going, it’s gonna be a beautiful-looking shitshow. If that boxing ring makes it through five rounds I’m gonna be amazed.”). At some point George asks Sapnap what he’s been up to, and Sapnap’s expression shutters as he says, “Watching out for people,” which George takes to mean with a swoop of fear in his stomach that Sapnap’s been protecting people, a desperately dangerous move in this political climate. He can’t exactly tell him off for it, though, so he grins and ruffles Sapnap’s hair and says, “Biggest heart of us all,” and gets a glint of fondness in his chest as a reward when Sapnap blushes and ducks his head.

Five minutes isn’t long. Just enough time for Sapnap to vent his frustrations, just enough time for George to pull him into one last hug before shooing him off, Sapnap carefully easing his front door back into its frame as he leaves. George watches him stroll off, deceptively relaxed, one hand in his pocket and the other resting on the axe at his belt, and feels the earlier grimness creep back in with every step Sapnap takes further away, alongside a new fear for Sapnap and his spitfire nature that he hadn’t felt so prevalently before. Sapnap’s too good at being brave, too good at fighting for what he believes in. If Schlatt takes notice of him...

George flops back into his cushions, pulls his comforter over his head, and wills himself back into a restless, forceful sleep.

He wakes up all of a sudden in the middle of the night for no discernible reason. He wasn’t having a nightmare or anything; all he can recall of his sleep is some faint, diaphanous scene with his friends and a field, maybe a gauzy manhunt memory, that’s already slipping away as his brain boots back up. He blinks at the wall opposite him blearily, trying to figure out what the hell’s going on, when there’s a rapid tapping at the window.

Immediately, George’s hackles rise, and the buzz of adrenaline gets his blood pumping as he busts through about four different possibilities in his head of what the source of the tapping could possibly be. He doesn’t have any weapons with him in the room - stupid, in hindsight - but George’s strength is less in his weaponry and more in his hand-to-hand, anyway, so it might all be fine.

The tapping comes again, louder and more frantic.

George pulls himself up centimeter by fucking centimeter, rests on his forearms as he squints into the vague moonlight to discern the outline at the window, and then he’s darting up, swearing as he disentangles himself from his comforter, tripping over to the window and nearly shattering it for how violently he forces it open, and he’s ready to catch him when Dream comes tumbling in over the sill.

“Dream?” hisses George, relieved and alarmed in one, because Dream is clutching at him with a desperation bordering on visceral. He’s supporting most of Dream’s weight as he walks them backward into the middle of the room, keeps his arms wrapped around Dream because he has no idea what to do with his hands otherwise, demanding, “Dream? _Dream?”_

Dream suddenly pulls away, and George is taken aback by what a month can do to a person when you’re not by their side twenty-four-seven like you’ve been for the past fourteen years. Dream’s face is sharper than George remembers, his hair longer, but what strikes George is how badly his best friend is shaking, how white he is in the weak moonlight, how unkempt he looks. Once he hit his late teens, once he grew into himself, Dream's image solidified into a wild child with an elven spirit, all thoughtless exacting grace, bold, impish, the quickest to smile in any given situation. George can’t see any of it right now - all he can make out is Dream, trembling, pale as a ghost, and it frightens George enough for him to grip Dream’s arms harder, as though that would keep him from melting away into a mere haunt.

“George,” whispers Dream, his voice strung high. “George, is there anything wrong, is everything okay with you?”

George freezes, not so much out of surprise as confusion at the completely nonsensical words. “Dream, what - ”

“George,” says Dream, his voice a plea, and George shuts up as Dream’s head drops between his shoulders, his entire back shuddering with the force of his panicked breathing, “is there anything wrong? Are you alright?”

“Dream, I don’t understand,” George replies immediately, distressed by Dream’s distress, because he doesn’t. This is so far out of left field that it’s practically from the right: seeing Dream for the first time in weeks only to find a haggard mess, the panic so steeped into him that it’s starting to taint George. Dream’s never been the first to break down in their family unit; it was usually George, the quickest to tears, or Sapnap, the quickest to anger. Dream was always mild-mannered, and especially once he hit his teens learned to be the one who calmed everyone down when tensions ran high. 

None of that levelheadedness is in the dull gleam of Dream’s eyes through his mask now, and George can feel that constant hungry apathy siren-singing him down and away, away from the fear and desperation and panic, away from the hum of dread in his bones every time he looks out a window into the somehow sad streets of Manberg,

and then Dream takes George’s face ever so carefully in his hands and whispers “George George George, are you - ”

_is he safe is he safe safe safe sift through the emotions you are the sea is he hurt does he hurt no no no but fear but anxiety but the quiet hum of sensations tamped down yes there are dregs but they are little hush now quiet now he is safe you kept him safe all quiet quiet quiet he’s safe_

George exhales and clarity descends upon him like the sun on a misty morning, clearing out the grey. Everything comes into sharp relief where it was vague and uninvolved before, and the fugue collapses out of his lungs, and he’s staring into Dream’s face as the nervous energy seeps out and it’s quiet inside instead of constant simmering turmoil for the first time in ages. 

“Dream,” he breathes, stricken, “what was that?”

Dream makes a distraught, losing sound, like a balloon losing air, and sinks down to his knees on the floor, taking George with him, and George is practically keeping him upright, judging by his pallor and how badly he’s shaking. “Dream,” George repeats, terrified, but then Dream is shuddering as he draws his hands away from George’s face and presses the heels of his palms into his mask where his eyes are.

He says, voice hoarse with something like despair, “They don’t get to have you too.”

“What,” George begins to say, on the verge of tears, but Dream shakes his head abruptly, leans back into his heels and stands up too fast and is staggering away and clambering out through the window, and George is just sitting in the middle of the room in the middle of the night, hands still outstretched as though welcoming someone home, as the night and the cloud and the moon on high swallow Dream whole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> your new boyfriend’s an arsehole.......!!!!!!!
> 
> you guys don’t UNDERSTAND the serotonin boost that song gives me it’s amazing i’ve never been mood boosted by a song before it’s always “i’m just vibing to this song and i like it very much” or “this song punches me in the throat” but THIS. MR SOOT HAS SAVED ME FROM MISERY ONCE AGAIN you lot best believe i’m gonna be streaming this song like MAD
> 
> ALSO TEAL TURKEYS SUPREMACY POGG CONGRATULATIONS TO KRINIOS, ILLUMINA, PUNZ, AND ERET WE LOVE TO SEE IT


	22. schlatt (the empty throne)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dream visits Schlatt in the Oval Office.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: very brief mentions of alcoholism
> 
> i’m very sorry if this is hard to read! i tried to find a cohesive way to put narratives together but what with the set stylistic choices i’d already made in previous chapters this chapter ended up being a mishmash of italic-bold and uh. yeah. if people are using text readers and the formatting fucks that up i’ll try to find a better way to format it but as of right now, yeah! this is the finished product ^^
> 
> jesus christ the html was so hard for this chapter i will just drop dead if i have to do that shit again
> 
> edit: I COULDVE BEEN USING RICH TEXT THIS ENTIRE TIME?????? B R O

Schlatt doesn’t blame Dream’s world. It’s a beautiful place, people smiling, people going about their day unmolested by war or bitterness. There’s a bakery a chunk down from the White House, its roof in green and white stripes. Houses are in wood planks and not stone. There are silly little statues everywhere.

And isn’t it all so **_boring?_**

He felt it first the day after he rejoined the server **_singing to him, a sweet long lullaby, don’t you remember the world you held in your hands before?_** Wilbur laughing and dragging him into a one-armed hug, explaining the state of the nation, telling him proudly that he was going to set up an election in order to promote the ideals of democracy he’d pushed for in the founding of L’Manberg. It’s **_amusing_**. Schlatt wishes him luck and Wilbur grins and they set off side-by-side like friends are supposed to do.

**_And he runs for president under his charming, pretty friend’s nose, grips Quackity’s hand with his smile sharp as a shark’s as they seal the deal, and he’s standing straight and tall and proud at the podium, his horns his crown, smiling down at wide-eyed Will as he purrs, “My first decree as the president of L’Manberg... the_ emperor...”**

The office is perfect. Schlatt thinks people flit in and out periodically to clear out the bottles he throws, but **_that suits him just fine, janitorial work is unbefitting of an emperor anyway, isn’t it?_** All open space, his back to the floor-to-ceiling windows circling him, **_a show of strength, a show of superiority, who dares put a knife in the king’s back when he invites it?_** He spends most of his days writing decrees, signing them, and drinking to **_celebrate_**. He also passes out a lot, possibly because of the drinking. Every once in a while he’ll hear Quackity crying **_because he’s the runt of the cabinet_** or catch Tubbo staring at him **_and he knows full well what Tubbo the little traitor is doing, but Schlatt’s benevolent, and he’s been around long enough to be very good at playing the long game. Tubbo may be clever but Schlatt is cleverer. There’s something special planned for the festival._**

Speaking of the festival - it’s shaping up quite nicely, in Schlatt’s opinion. The last week or so have been dedicated to putting it together, and Schlatt’s taken long walks down the barren streets, admiring the colorful decorations and food stands and note blocks, feeling a faint thread of nostalgia. Someone’s put flowers by the walkway. There are balloons tied to the booths _(people care)._

The podium is especially nice. Fundy, for all that he **_squirrels himself away for days at a time like the coward he is, shrinking away from his president,_** didn’t hold back on rebuilding and improving the stage they tore down the night after the successful election. A towering build of rustic cobble and intimidating blackstone framed by elegant spires of glassy quartz, the rush of crystalline water from the fountains rigged up within the podium, and right in the center of the stage looms a dark gleaming seat **_just for him to lounge in as he gives his speeches, a throne for the emperor, the rightful place of the ruler of his prosperous, beloved_** _(will’s ruined, demolished) **country.**_

He’s observed the festival grounds enough that he’s **_bored_** of it by the time the actual day comes around. He’s sitting back in his chair, tipping onto the back legs and debating whether or not he should pack a sword to poke a little fun at the main attraction, no pun intended, when the chat buzzes.

Schlatt huffs, mildly peeved - he’s told Fundy and Quackity and Tubbo he wants them to speak to him face-to-face, not via chat, since everyone can read the global chat and Schlatt knows how to keep his cards close to his chest, but it’s nothing of particular importance - Quackity says _You have a visitor._

Schlatt snorts. _i have plenty of visitors all the time, flatty patty,_ he replies dismissively. _i can only see so many people, you know?_

_It’s Dream._

Schlatt’s fingers freeze on his keyboard.

_Schlatt?_

**_Dream in the crowd off in an alleyway, loud green hoodie muffled by the enchanted violet of his netherite armor, a single glance up toward the podium, and their gazes meet, and Dream may be the owner of this world but Schlatt?_ **

**_He can do_ so much better.**

_mr. president to you, honeybunch. show him in._

_Sure, mr. president._

Schlatt’s got his fingers steepled below his chin when the doors to the Oval Office breeze open to admit the tall, unrelenting green bastard.

For a silent, tense moment, they size each other up. Schlatt’s **_impressed with how neat and tidy Dream is, back straight and shoulders squared, hair tied up from his signature half-up half-down into a combat-suited bun, the line of his mouth grim and uncompromising, as though he doesn’t feel a shred of pain._** A slat of clean white sunlight from a nearby pane falls across Dream’s face, catches on his mask, makes him glow. It’s part of why Schlatt likes the windows-lining-him setup - silhouetted by the sun, he is indiscernible, untouchable, alight. Dream, mask a beacon, stays just beyond the reach of the desk, his arms crossed, clearly scrutinizing Schlatt in turn.

Schlatt’s patient enough, but given the time constraint - the festival is in ten hours - he thinks he ought to bring this meeting to a start. “Hello, Dream! Welcome to the White House. How’s your stay been?”

Dream says evenly, “Just fine, thanks.”

“Oh? **_Even your little trip to your friend’s house last night?”_**

Dream’s expression remains perfectly placid. “Just _fine,_ thanks.”

 ** _He’s good. He’s gotten better, actually, since Schlatt saw him last, which means little Dream has gotten used to lying and lying often and knows the value in an excellent poker face like Schlatt’s own. A pity the way the lines have been drawn, really._** “Well, that’s that, I guess. What’s the purpose of your visit? Surely not to beg for an invitation. It’s a bit late, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“I don’t beg.” Dream hasn’t moved a muscle since he entered the office and the doors glided shut behind him. **_Stubborn fool._**

“That so?” Mind games have always been Schlatt’s strong suit. He could probably bring a country to its knees with his silver tongue, always knowing which buttons to push, always able to gauge where there are weak links - a disgruntled soldier, a greedy landlord, a selfish prince - and how to twist them. His friend’s not the only one who’s started revolutions - Schlatt has a different methodology, has a keener eye for the undeserving and entitled where Will picks out the downtrodden and ambitious, but they both know how people tick.

**_A child god is no match for him._ **

**_“You might wanna start now,”_** Schlatt croons, leaning back into his chair and spreading his arms. **_“I know why you’re really here.”_**

Dream finally shifts, his shoulders tensing, the line of his mouth stiff. “Yeah? Tell me why, Schlatt. Enlighten me,” he snipes back, cocking his head, condescending.

Schlatt smiles sweetly at him, all teeth. ** _“Trying to figure out what’s wrong with your little world, eh?”_** _(what) **“Why things have gone so horrifically wrong?”** (what am i) **“You think I’m the source, don’tcha?”**_

Dream hums. “Depends on your definition of ‘I,’” he says shrewdly, **_and oh, the child’s already caught on - magnificent._**

 ** _“Should I drop the whole act?”_** Schlatt gestures down at himself _(what am i doing)_ and winks. **_“That gonna make you freak out?”_**

“Nothing you do is going to make me freak out, Schlatt.”

 **_“Are”_ ** _(wait) **“you”** (WAIT) **“sure?”**_

And Schlatt rolls his shoulders back and he **_becomes._**

_**Nothing changes, physically speaking; Schlatt doesn’t sprout wings or grow a halo or something showy and out-there like that, but he does settle into the edges of his skin better, can sense more, yawns and cracks his neck and says “Oh, now isn’t that better?” with ozone on his breath and for the first time since their metaphorical stand-off Dream falters.** _

****“Schlatt,” ** _he says, clearly trying not to sound hesitant but failing miserably. For all his power and his cunning he’s a babe of a god, barely two decades old, nothing of any consequence in the grand scheme of things. Schlatt bares his teeth at the little god._**

_**“That would be me,” he sings, his ears flicking. “Frightened, Dream? And you tried so hard to act the part of the fearless warrior just now. Pathetic.”** _

**_Dream’s mouth flinches, but he doesn’t give an inch._** “Answer me this: is Schlatt in there?”

**_“He is I and I am he.” It’s not a lie, not really. “He doesn’t particularly know, now, does he? He sees as I see and hears as I hear and feels as I feel, but everything is exactly right, and everything is in our - his -_ my _hands.” And oh, the jewel-sharp sweetness of victory burning his throat - “This is my magnum opus, Dream - Manberg, that flag flying above this White House, the festival and the people who are going to love that fuckin’ festival.”_**

****“You _broke people_ to get here.” **_Dream’s angry, now: posture canted forward, green eyes a blazing fire beneath his mask. Schlatt’s not intimidated by it at all - Dream’s just grieving the smoldering corpse of the oasis he tried and failed to create, and everyone knows what the next stage is in the Kübler-Ross model._**

_**“Stepping stones, Dream. You know the meaning, I’m sure.” He waves his arm out at Manberg flowing out toward the horizon, unfurling like the flag he designed in a fury, a small sea of boxy faded rooftops and a spot of bright colors and blinking lights at the festival grounds. “Look at the Eden we’ve made, Dream. You’re just as much a part of this as I, you know?” He sneers. “Just as much of a destroyer.”** _

_**When he spins back around, Dream’s hands are outstretched** _

_is he there is he there yes yes yes tainted polluted the mind is a cage and something prowls within he was lured he was trapped he was lured lured lured polluted polluted this is twisted this is madness_

_**Dream reels back, the color draining from his face, his mouth slack with horror, with disbelief. Schlatt feels a surge of vicious glee at how badly he’s shaking, at the proof of infinitesimal, cowering humanity in what otherwise wouldn’t be too bad of a minor god. Weak weak weak, from the inability to perform basic potions effects without repercussions to the look on his face that Schlatt absolutely relishes when he leans in and says** (without even understanding what he’s saying) **“You can’t even fix it,**_ **young god.”**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short but sweet (not really). final chapter may take a bit as i've got quite a bit to write and a lot of ideas i want to incorporate; you can expect it to be up by the end of the week, i think!


	23. if you want to go to heaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...

The sun is just barely visible over the treetops by the time Dream arrives in Manberg. He edges past the few derelict husks of houses that border the country - one could call them the slums, if they weren’t so obviously lifeless - and wedges himself into an alleyway, scales the building he’s up against with ease. Bird’s-eye view is always best, and if anything goes wrong, Dream’ll have a clearer path to escape aboveground than not.

The main street lies barren, hopelessly grey, and for some reason Dream’s reminded of the off color to Schlatt’s face that morning, the feeling of his heart tumbling down to his toes, as though he were a rabbit before a wolf. The memory brings goosebumps to his skin and he pauses, bites his lip, rubs his arms. 

He’s not one to lie to himself; it was frightening. Minor gods are born, not made, and he learned most everything he knows through personal experience. His only encounter with something greater than himself was  _ them _ , and he’s largely cast them from his mind, the only remnant being the whisper when he settles someone; Schlatt and Wilbur both, or whatever’s within them, is beyond Dream’s scope of knowledge. Wilbur had been a hint, and Dream had gone into today’s meeting hoping that he was better than whatever it was slinking around his world under his nose, but, well.

The last weak glare of sunlight trickles away into evening proper. Music begins to play faintly down the street.

Dream straightens, shakes himself, and leaps over to the next roof. It brings the actual festival into sight, and on impulse, he ducks his head to keep himself invisible from the point of view from the ground, but even three roofs over, he goes unnoticed. On any other day he might’ve stuck out like a sore thumb, prancing around the rooftops of Manberg, but for all that everyone was dreading the festival they’re all clearly doing their best to enjoy it; Dream spots Purpled and Jack smiling over a toy won from balloon darts, and Fundy and Niki further down the street, offering funnel cakes to passersby. It would make a pretty picture, late evening bathing everyone in molten amber, the streets lined with clusters of pastel flowers, the gentle murmur of conversation and speckling of laughter, if it weren’t for the seething anxiety that prowls the festival grounds like a sentinel. Dream can read it, can interpret it, and he knows how to settle it, but - 

He won’t think about that. 

Dream crouches, tightens the tie on his mask and pulls his hood down over his hair with a grimace, feeling far more exposed than he normally does. He left his netherite armor at his base - he thought he wouldn’t be able to see this through to the end if he kept the heavy stuff on - but he does spare a moment of regret as he hops over to the next building; the armor, with its duller purple tones, serves both as a defense and as a camouflage. He did bring his axe - he’s not  _ that _ stupid - and if push really comes to shove, well, he did lend his beloved crossbow to Tommy. He may be a minor god, but he knows better than to let it get to his head (he’s seen enough of minor gods abusing their status and lording their power over other people for a lifetime, thanks), so the crossbow’s enchantments are all ones that he got through stronghold adventuring and a few arrows to the back. He wonders only a little jokingly if Tommy managed to break the thing before the festival; even if it was just a week or two ago, Dream doesn’t put it past him. 

There’s a wider gap when he hits an intersection, the clear hub of activity, and Dream can’t help himself even though he knows he should be hustling: he kneels, positioning himself so the balustrade hides him. A fountain of stone bricks bubbles away merrily in the center, a climber plant winding its way up the uneven rock; Sapnap is sitting on the edge between Quackity and Karl, the three giggling like schoolchildren and passing a plate of donut holes back and forth, and Dream is  _ so _ going to tease Sapnap and demand to be the best man later, but something tightens behind his sternum, looking down at the luminous, wan face of his best friend, and he bites his lip again as he turns away and studies the side streets. The street right before the building he’s sitting on houses the ice rink, larger and more hazardous than Dream expected, what with the lack of sturdy railings and the unmanned ice skate rental. It’s hard to tell with the fading sun and mood lighting provided by the lanterns, but Dream thinks it’s Bad and Ant gliding over the ice with an air of tranquility. The next street over sports a rickety boxing ring that looks to be on the brink of collapse and a dunk tank that Dream sorely hopes will see Schlatt dunked by the end of the night, but for now, the booths are empty, and Dream’s gaze drifts down the street toward the rows of bare chairs, up the cobblestone foundation, and at the dark, threatening podium, now featuring a blackstone  _ throne _ , of all things. 

He feels his lip curl, not so much out of disgust as out of morbid fascination. Whatever it is poisoning his world is  _ brazen; _ Wilbur and Schlatt and the festival edging on war is a clear threat, though for what perceived transgression Dream has no idea. As far as he knows, he’s never broken a cardinal (a miracle in and of itself, seeing as how he didn’t even know those were a thing until he ransacked a stronghold library at age fifteen, not that the cardinals were anything too hard to uphold), which is the only conceivable reason Dream can think of for a blatant “fuck-you” like this by something that has the power to twist humans. 

And that’s part of the other problem, too, isn’t it - the fact that when he tried to bait Schlatt, he didn’t get a hint of autonomy, just Schlatt and something venomous in him. He hadn’t had the time to properly analyze Wilbur when they’d spoken, for how caught-off-guard Dream was (his own fault, really), and the next time they met face-to-face, Wilbur had demanded the TNT right off the bat. Dream knew about Schlatt through Quackity, by that point, so he’d bitten his tongue and forked it over and shielded Wilbur with his own body when Tommy levelled an arrow at him, hating every aspect of the situation. What was a child soldier to do? A friend? A little brother?

No, whatever it is that wrung his friends from themselves has taken its leave and left a disaster brewing in its wake. 

Dream digs his nails into his palms and turns sharp eyes back down to the crowd, reminding himself to focus, deeming himself close enough to the center of activity at the moment for him to maintain his position. There’ll be no war tonight if he has any say in it. 

Nothing of particular consequence happens for what must be at least an hour. Dream would normally pace - he’s always full of nervous energy, has always needed to  _ move _ , a trait that’s stricken him as ironic at times, given that wanderlust is a distinctly human quality in godly eyes (not that he would be the best example) - but the manhunt headspace is descending upon him, the razor-fine focus that widens his field of vision, slows his heartrate, clears his mind, so that it’s only him and his surroundings, only him and the people around him. He’s so in the zone he doesn’t notice the time going by; he pinpoints five possible exit points, three spots he could potentially take warning shots from in order to scatter the crowd, and watches the weary population of Manberg wake up for the self-indulgent party their president put together. He picks up on unrelated snippets of information periodically - Techno climbs out of the dunk tank and immediately demands a glass of water; Purpled trips HBomb on the rink and makes a run for it with his skates still on when HBomb gets back up, comically fuming; Tubbo knocks Quackity out cold in the boxing ring and apologizes profusely to the unconscious vice president. At one point, Dream catches a glimpse of George, who’s obviously looking for something, craning his neck in the crowd. He watches as George finds Sapnap, as the two embrace, as Sapnap begins to talk animatedly and George responds with equal verve, both of them rosy-cheeked with familiarity and delight.

He wishes he could see them one more time before - 

Dream’s  _ not thinking about it. _

“Tubbo, turn on the microphone, would ya?”

Dream feels it in his  _ core _ the instant the atmosphere shifts. It must be Schlatt, or Wilbur, or both, maybe; the hatred of it all, the bitterness, the terror, hits him like a sword to the gut, and he nearly keels over as he waits on the roof overlooking the festival, grasping at his heart, choking on the seething roil of emotions in the congregating crowd. The lanterns strung up over the streets, the carnival games, the aroma of fried foods wafting up into the night, all of it is in stark contrast to the underlying hum of nervous energy that Dream can feel like water under an oil slick. He can barely think through the fog of fear; the colorful lights look garish, phosphenes beneath his eyelids when he closes his eyes to ward off the looming headache. His heartbeat thrums slow in his ears and he has to go, he has to go, it’s nearly time, he has to go.

Just as an indulgence, though, Dream lets himself take a deep breath. One. Two. Steel himself. 

This is going to hurt. 

When he squints down at the crowd, concentration completely ruined, he can see why the collective emotions snapped at him so violently: everyone’s faces are turned toward the podium, and everyone’s faces have shuttered into various states of dread. From Dream’s slightly awkward vantage point, he can just make out the bleak look on Sam’s face, the undisguised disgust in Skeppy’s, the resignation in Ponk’s. The way everyone trudges toward the podium as though they were whipped cattle is another stab at Dream’s heart, how defeated they all look when they mill around the seats, staring up at the dark tower. It’s made worse, Dream thinks, by the fact that not everyone there is from Manberg - he knows Bad and Skeppy are in there somewhere, he saw Ant earlier, and Sam is sure to be around as well, and none of them are citizens of Manberg, but you wouldn’t know it for the distinctly helpless looks they shoot at once another as they sit amongst their friends.

Dream stands, stretches, leaps one more building closer for the proximity to his friends and to remain within earshot of the podium. For all that he was completely in the zone earlier, he’s getting nervous now, and when he moves to grip his axe for want of something to do with his hands, they tremble noticeably. He swears under his breath and runs his fingers slowly over the blade of the axe as though it were a pet, keeping one eye on the stage and one eye on the audience, though it doesn’t look like the latter’s about to make any sudden moves. He takes stock of them anyway, as they all wait for the cabinet to appear on the podium; most, at least, are wearing armor over their casual clothing, and he can see several people keeping a hand on their swords or bows. He does a double-take when he notices a familiar proud, antlered head toward the back of the audience, almost forgets himself and calls out to Callahan, who he hasn’t seen in a month and a half. Dream can’t tell whether the feeling in his gut is a welcoming warmth of a cold, sour worry.

There’s a self-important  _ tap tap tap _ on the mic. Dream inhales deeply and turns just in time to see Schlatt tug on his lapels and open his arms wide. 

“Y’know, I do like to make fun of Tubbo,” he begins smoothly, indicating with his head toward the boy standing to his side, and Dream purses his lips when he sees the knifelike edge in Tubbo’s eyes that wasn’t there before - Tubbo may have been a strategist even before playing spy for Pogtopia, but no sane person leaves a child to put a leash on a tyrant, “for all the shit he does. We can all agree that Tubbo fucks up a lot.” Schlatt pats Quackity’s shoulder with all the possessiveness of a ringmaster at a circus, and Quackity doesn’t move an inch. 

Schlatt’s smile widens. 

“But at the end of the day, Tubbo’s... Tubbo’s the guy who made this happen!” Dream sits up, narrows his eyes. “He’s slavin’ away, he’s minin’ and craftin’, he’s buildin’ all this beautiful stuff... and, uh... y’know, I don’t know if we’d be where we are today without him.” 

“Thank you, Schlatt,” says Tubbo mildly.

Schlatt tilts his head to look at his secretary of state, lazy smile still plastered over his face. “I mean, I do consider you my right-hand man,” he tells him plainly. 

Tubbo doesn’t even blink. Schlatt accepts the non-answer in stride and turns back to address the audience.

“Well, anyways, I mean, when Tubbo said, y’know, ‘Schlatt, I’d like to say my piece about how great this country is and how awesome you are,’ I mean, who’m I to say no to that, right?” Schlatt winks coyly at the people of Manberg below him, clearly in his element, a shark abovewater with a carcass beneath him. Dream tastes blood when Schlatt sweeps his arm out with a flourish and acquiesces the throne to Tubbo with a showy, “So without any further ado, I’m gonna put Tubbo, my right-hand man... my  _ protegee _ ... on the mic!”

Dream tears his eyes away from the podium for just a minute to wipe away the blood at his mouth from gnawing on his lip, cursing fast and low as he pulls his sleeve up to pat his face. He thinks he might have smeared it onto the bottom rim of his mask, but it’s not really something he can fix at this point, so he shrugs it off and winds his fingers back around the handle of his axe and looks up at Tubbo and freezes, feeling fear twine ice-cold through his veins.

He doesn’t know how he didn’t hear it happen - Tubbo, boxed in by yellow concrete, his face ashen as Schlatt leers at him from one side and Quackity looks at his shoes, shoulders hiked up to his ears. Dream’s pulling himself closer with the balustrade, hissing “What the fuck” over and over, when Schlatt coos, “Technoblade, you wanna come up here a second?”

Dream whips his head around fast enough to catch Techno’s expression flattening, but Techno’s always been an expert at burying everything he feels six feet deep under his skin, and when he drawls, “Sure,” drops a bucket of water by his feet with a clang, and tridents up to the podium, Dream knows it’s an effort to intimidate. He winces when Schlatt just grins wider, animalistic, and he can sense the the unease that ripples through the audience, the sudden spike of fear from someone in the front row, the burning frustration from someone further off. Just a glance to the side confirms they know something is desperately, horribly wrong; Dream can make out the telltale white-blue glow of a trident in Sam’s hand, and Niki’s toeing the bow at her feet, he thinks he sees George of all people hurrying off somewhere, and Dream’s own knuckles are white on his axe.

“Techno, we go way back. I only call you in for special favors, you know,” Schlatt says, almost gentle if it weren’t for the serrated edge to his voice, and Dream can nearly  _ hear _ the shift in Techno’s demeanor the instant those words come out of Schlatt’s mouth; where he might normally outright contest someone threatening his brother he starts to drag his feet instead, obviously buying time for someone to step in, for someone to tell him to stop, for someone to kill Schlatt. 

No one does, because no one can.

Dream can feel it too, at the back of his mind: a syrup-slow something turning the air to molasses, and it’s only because he’s not human that he shakes his head clear of it. It might be Schlatt, using the poison in his mind as an extension of his whims, knowing better how to be part of it than be destroyed by it entirely. It’s not important, because Dream’s focus is narrowing, because Techno’s shoulders are curling in, because the firework crossbow in Techno’s hands is coming up.

Like the peal of a bell, loud and clear and desperate over the terrified intake of breath from the crowd: “I’m sorry, Tubbo - Tubbo, I’ll make it as painless as possible - ”

Schlatt, eyes wild, cackling, “Do it, Technoblade,  **_do it, DO IT - ”_ **

The pearl’s in Dream’s hand and his aim has always been true and he sticks his landing on the podium amidst the shrieks of recognition from the crushed people of Manberg and he stomps the sword out of Quackity’s hand and bodily blocks Techno’s aim and he locks eyes with the creature in Schlatt’s skin

and Dream

_ settles _

_ just a breath just a moment take the fear take the anger breathe in breathe out coax it from a blaze to an ember boil to a simmer it’s yours take it take it they’re yours they’re yours take on their burden they’re yours and  _

Dream blows out a shaky exhale. His vision’s edging gray, which is a bad sign. He’s learned his limits over the years; it’s not like he had anyone to learn from, and the old god - well,  _ the _ old god, for Dream - had only ever warned him to be careful before leaving his life forever. Still, for them - for them, he’d do anything. 

Everyone has frozen still. He needs to be efficient about this, so he only skims the crowd, but he does make brief eye contact with Bad, whose hand is on the hilt of his sword, whose mouth is slack in shock, in something like recognition, and then Bad blinks and his eyes well up and Dream needs to  _ focus _ .

Gently, gently, he reaches out to Techno, who doesn’t so much as blink. Maybe he’d guessed. He’d probably guessed; Techno’s no fool, and his adoptive father is a minor god, and Dream might as well have waved a bright red flag in Techno’s face when he pulled that invisibility stunt. It doesn’t matter anymore. Dream places his hands over Techno’s, can tell that the combat genius’s hands are as calloused as his. He works Techno’s fingers out of their death grip on the crossbow, lets the weapon clatter to the paneled stage floor, wills the fireworks to sizzle away into nothingness, and when Techno’s breath hitches minutely, the closest Dream may ever see his friend to faltering, Dream puts his forehead to his friend’s and murmurs, “It’s okay.” 

He turns to Tubbo next, who’s trembling with his wrists caught on the wooden post, like a rabbit in a snare. Dream feels his heart clench in a way that has nothing to do with the amount of power he just exerted; he waves the rope away into wisps and as carefully as he can pulls Tubbo to his feet. The kid shakes even then, nearly falling over when he gets to a standing position, his face bone-white; Dream gathers him into a tremulous hug, and once Tubbo gets his arms around him he won’t let go, clinging like Dream’s a buoy and Tubbo’s in a storm at sea. He whispers brokenly into Dream’s shirt, “I know I know I  _ know _ it isn’t permanent but I wasn’t ready to die,” and Dream has to set his jaw and let go before he can say without his voice breaking, “I know.”

Quackity might not think he needs it but he does, so Dream takes his next steps toward him. Quackity must expect rebuke, some kind of violence; he ducks his head and squares his shoulders, ashamed but not looking to slough off his guilt onto the obvious scapegoat. Dream can read the yearning there, the heartbreak over what might have been and what has been, and it feels like Dream’s heart might fall out of his chest when he drops a light hand onto Quackity’s shoulder and tells him lowly, “You did what you could.”

Schlatt’s gaze follows Dream when he moves toward him. Nothing about his cool, collected appearance hints at the madness he’s tainted with; not a hair out of place, horns buffed to a shine, politician’s smile never wavering. It’s only because Dream can sense what Schlatt has within him that he can see that gleaming, greasy film over Schlatt’s eyes, turning him mad, turning him wrong. Dream remembers a tidbit of what the old god had taught him, before, and he turns the knowledge over in his mind carefully, takes Schlatt’s face in his hands, bestows a light kiss upon Schlatt’s forehead when he closes his eyes on some ancient instinct, a vestige of a time when gods walked the earth the way Dream does now. It’s like swallowing fire, or a sword, and Dream feels like his throat is scraped raw when he pulls that malicious shard away from Schlatt, but it’s worth it to see the flicker of awareness on Schlatt’s face, the glimmer in his eyes that tells Dream what he wanted to hear. He stumbles away.

George had been on the side of the stage, once again on the wings as chaos unfolded on the podium. Dream hadn’t noticed him, notices him now when he nearly falls over his best friend. 

“Dream, oh my god,” George manages, his words coming out strangled, heavy with the awareness of what Dream is doing, what Dream had done last night, but Dream stops him talking with a wan smile. He fixes the skew of George’s sunglasses and squeezes his hand and hopes that will convey everything he can’t say right now as he turns and soldiers on.

Everyone in the crowd may as well be holding their breath for how quiet they are. Everyone may not be there, but that’s alright - everyone who’s present needs him, and that’s good enough for Dream. He picks his way through the throng of people and finds Niki first, whose eyes are huge and glassy. He lets her wind her arms around him and practically squeeze the life out of him and he thumbs away the tears at her eyes as he murmurs, “You did good, Niki,” which makes her begin to cry in earnest.

Bad’s beside her, looking trapped, Skeppy and Ant and Sam surrounding him, the ones who chose neutrality first at the beginning of this shitshow. When Dream gets to them Bad makes an awful wrung-out sound that may or may not be “Oh,  _ Dream,” _ and throws his arms around Dream, making sure not to force all of his weight onto him. Skeppy follows suit quickly, and there’s a tortured look on Ant’s face and a pinched, pained one on Sam’s as they all cling to him, and Dream revels for the brief second during which he’s completely reliant on other people to keep him standing. It can’t last, of course, and he pushes off of them after a moment, but the relief is sweet nonetheless, and it’s with gratefulness that he tells them all, thinking of manhunts and mineshafts and a tunnel untouched, “Getting away from this isn’t cowardice.”

The moment he steps away Sapnap  _ jumps _ him, is crushing the air out of Dream between one blink and the next, gasps, “Dream, Dream,  _ Dream,” _ one hand buried in Dream’s curls and the other stroking Dream’s back as though they were children again and one of them had woken up from a nightmare. Warmth, familiarity, bubbles up in Dream’s chest like magma, and he feels the same burgeoning and uncomplicated adoration he feels for George prod him into gripping Sapnap’s shoulders and whispering, “You were so brave,” and has to turn away when Sapnap’s face crumples. 

Fundy’s haggard countenance emerges from between blurry faces and he immediately reaches for Dream when he looks around, unsure. A quiet, buoyant sort of smile rises to Dream’s face upon seeing his friend and fiancé, and he smooths his hand over the shuddery slant of Fundy’s mouth and assures him, “It’s not your fault,” and lets Fundy choke a sob into Dream’s shoulder. He suffered, of course he did; no one won when Manberg rose from the ashes. But Fundy, bound to L’Manberg’s president by everything but blood, had agonized over the line between his two heritages that was beginning to smear so badly. Dream holds Fundy’s hands in his own cold ones for a long while before he’s ready to continue.

He’s staggering now, obviously so, but when hands emerge in an attempt to steady him Dream shies away because he knows if he leans on them he won’t be able to get moving again. Every set of eyes he meets are familiar, though, wide and worried, and he stops for each: passes his hand through Purpled’s hair as the kid weeps silently into his sleeve and pats Jack’s shoulder as he wraps his arms around himself; settles his arms around Karl in turn when he nearly bowls Dream over with the force of his hug, mirroring his fiancé; accepts Callahan’s thunderous expression as he clutches Dream’s face in his hands and mouths  _ idiot _ at him over and over again; winds his fingers through the pale Punz’s and tries to reassure him with his eyes; lets Ponk tug at his arm to check his pulse and smiles ruefully when Ponk’s eyes widen; clasps HBomb’s hands back when he clenches them. At one point Dream fancies he sees a flash of Eret’s silver eyes, at another Alyssa’s fleeting, flickery smile, and the paranoia that he might be hallucinating makes him stop looking; he marches forward resolutely, step by step, til he finally reaches the back of the crowd and sees someone he’s been waiting to speak to.

Tommy is at the stone-spotted grass where the forest meets Manberg, gasping for breath, like he ran there. His jaw is working but he seems speechless; his gaze bounces from Tubbo to Techno to Schlatt before settling on Dream, and something in his face clears.

“Dream,” he says, softer and far more careful than Dream’s ever heard him. “What’s going on? I thought - I thought Tubbo - ” here his eyes ricochet back up to glance at Tubbo. Dream can still faintly taste the panic that pours off of Tubbo, but now it’s dimmed to take place at the back of Dream’s mind, and Tommy’s terror is louder, more demanding; it’s latched onto him, not quite paranoia but getting there, a parasite. It’s easy to be afraid when you are never alone but always lonely, and it’s that thought that gets Dream to move once more, swaying once or twice but still managing to make it to Tommy, who’s stiffened. He glares at Dream defiantly, but all Dream can really see of him in that moment is the trembling lip, the glaze of tears unshed, the fury and fear that seethes from him, and Dream can only whisper, imploring, “Tommy,” and drag the unresponsive kid into an embrace. 

Tommy, true to himself, immediately pushes away with a disgruntled snap of “What the fuck, Dream, I haven’t forgiven you for shit, don’t just go about hugging me,” but telltale tears begin to leak from the corners of his eyes, and he swears even more colorfully as he violently swipes them away with his arm only for more to take their place. He paws at his face for a few more futile seconds before spluttering, watery and weary, “Oh,  _ shit _ ,” and promptly bursting into tears. 

Dream kneels gingerly before Tommy, who’s covered his face with his hands, his shoulders curled into his chest like his gravity is dragging him inward. Dream knows how many times in the past few weeks Tommy has looked at his leader and friend and eldest brother and seriously considered putting an arrow between his shoulders, a decision no person, let alone child, should have to make. Dream won’t unearth trauma buried but

_ go go on smooth the rough edges down scars remain but the sting will settle you cannot remove but you can ease _

and Tommy is staring at Dream, already lighter, with something like wonder and something like dread in his eyes. 

“Dream,” he says, slowly, realization dawning on him, tears still clinging like snow to his lashes. “What have you been doing?”

Dream barely hears Tommy’s question; he’s becoming very aware that he might not be able to stand back up for the final confrontation he’s planned, and god damn it, he’s overestimated himself again, overstretched, at this crucial point - but Tommy, miracle of miracles, offers him a hand hesitantly and doesn’t comment when Dream has to completely rely on Tommy’s strength to get back up. 

Footsteps crunch closer. His heartbeat thrums slow in his ears. Dream faces the person who needs him most.

“Hello, Wilbur.”

Wilbur looks awful. There’s something beaten-down in the slump of his shoulders, and the circles under his eyes are the dark of fresh bruises. His hair foams up under the beanie, wild and dirty, and there are half-healed scratches all over his skin. His trench coat is torn as though by angry mobs. His weight is shifted to one side. There is something shattered in his eyes.

“Dream,” he growls, taking a step forward. “Dream, what have you been doing?” It’s Tommy’s question, but where Tommy’s had the weight of an understanding being reached Wilbur’s is all corners, all shards, all the edges of a blade. His voice is pitched low, menacing. The look on his face is the exposed underbelly of stormclouds.

Dream grits his teeth and tries to run a few calculations in his head, even though he knows calculations have nothing to do with a god’s power, that it’s all in the feel of it. “Laying hurts to rest. Calming people down. Wilbur...”

“ _ You _ gave me the TNT, Dream.” Wilbur’s tone has gone acrid and mocking. “ _ You’re _ the one who handed me the dynamite and told me to do what I liked with it, and now you’re telling me you’re, what? Cleaning up my mess?” He laughs, high and unhinged. “Playing god again?”

That stings, brings him back to the chill of the ravine when he’d first realized there was a poison in his friend. “I don’t...”

Wilbur’s gaze snaps cold, frostbite-sharp. “Hypocrite,” he spits. “You’re a murderer too, and you know it, Dream. Don’t act so high-and-mighty just because you stopped some heads from rolling. They’re not what matter here!” Tommy makes a stepped-on noise; Dream wonders if he’s thinking of Tubbo, nearly a corpse; Tubbo, nearly drowned by noise and color.

“They’re people, Wilbur.”

“No, Dream, they’re not. They’re willing pawns.” Wilbur is truly ranting now, swept up in the avalanche of his emotions, caged in with the beast that is the selfsame madness that swallowed his successor. “They’re yes-men, every last one of them - they let me and Tommy get hunted out of our home like  _ animals _ and never even thought to - to help us.” His words splinter. “No, they’re not what I care about here - what I want is L’Manberg! And if they’re so desperate to destroy it - ” His hand flashes up, and Dream feels like a fist clenches around his insides when he spots the makeshift button, “ - I’ll bury everyone with it.”

“No. No, you won’t.” Dream makes his way toward Wilbur, approaching the way one approaches a wounded animal. Listens to the voice at the back of his head that says  _ be slow, be gentle, be kind _ . “Wilbur... Listen.”

“No no  _ no no  _ **_no_ ** _.” _ Wilbur, button still in hand, begins to pull at his hair, crunching in half, his breath leaving him in ragged sputters. “Manberg dies here, Manberg dies tonight; my L’Manberg, my home, my palace, I built it from the ground up with my bare fucking hands and they dare take it from me, my love, how  _ could _ they,  **_how could they - ”_ **

Dream pulls himself together as best he can, gathers up the last loose threads of his power. Draws in one deep breath, two, and some of the clearheadedness that abandoned him returns now, as Wilbur’s fingers twitch on the button.

“I’ll kill  _ all of us -  _ ”

Dream engulfs Wilbur in a hug.

It’s awkward, but only because Wilbur’s so tall and Dream had tried to drape his arms over Wilbur’s shoulders, so now he’s stuck on tiptoe and leaning against Wilbur, in danger of tipping over should the former president move at all. The flow of poisonous words stops - either out of shock or out of heartache - and Dream takes the opening to draw back, take Wilbur’s haunted face in his hands, and press his lips determinedly to Wilbur’s forehead

_ hate rage hate hate a twisting a writhing a vengeful love l’manberg my one and only the light the genesis the untouched the beacon terror betrayal they hurt us they hurt me they hurt tommy fear fear they’ll get us again bitter bitter bitter how dare they we did everything for them i did everything for them decay decay dying are we the villains dying dying let’s blow that motherfucker to smithereens dying if i can’t have l’manberg dead  _ **_no one can have l’manberg..._ **

_ almost gone almost gone diving after him a faint flicker of him he is there he is drowning guide him back up take the rage take the hate take the fear take the pain smooth the surface the water is but ripples breathe breathe breathe you’ve got him he’s here he’s here awake blinking breathing  _

_ take it take it it’s not his anymore it’s yours it hurts but it’s not his hurt it hurts it hurts but at least it’s not him at least it’s not them they’re yours forever yours no more hurting that’s enough that’s enough... _

If taking Schlatt’s madness was swallowing fire, this is walking into a burning building and sitting down and letting himself be flayed alive.

Dream knew, from the outset, that Wilbur’s madness was something else entirely, everyone’s uncertainty and burgeoning fear given bestial form. Where Schlatt took on his insanity like a mantle, Wilbur’s ate him alive from the inside out, rotting him, gouging him out and hanging him out to dry. Schlatt consumed, where Wilbur was consumed; Schlatt destroyed, where Wilbur was destroyed.

Schlatt only had that single, flickering-flame coal to take. Dream pulls a firestorm from Wilbur’s head. 

He thinks this may be an apt explanation for why when he comes to he’s screaming.

It  _ hurts _ . Dream’s powers have always been a slow, simmering thing, and he passed as human well because he could rarely rely on them for how faint they were at times. There were sparks occasionally, and Dream grasped at them when the opportunity arose, but all in all he only ever used his powers for the big things. Shaping the Dream SMP, protecting people, maybe a quiet moment when he could make his friends smile, and for the grand finale, this: stopping a war, quieting enmity, drawing the demons out of his friends’ heads.

Dream went into this wondering if minor gods could die.

Dry heaving from the agony splintering up under his skin, he thinks he might.

“Oh god oh god oh god,” someone whimpers rapid-fire above him, and a set of hands brings him upright to be cradled in someone else’s arms, and people are arguing or crying or shushing as he gasps and holds on for dear life. It sears everywhere under his skin.

“Shh, shh...” the person holding him whispers, but they sound like they’re crying, and Dream wants to see who it is, but  _ god _ , it  _ burns _ , and heat licks behind his eyes as he forces them open and finds himself staring into George’s red, puffy eyes. 

“ _ Dream _ ,” George near shrieks, clutching him harder. The jolt brings the pain back into crystal clarity and Dream twists to muffle his cry into George’s shoulder. Somewhere above him, Dream can hear Sapnap swear, vicious, watery. 

“Is he awake, oh no,” someone says breathlessly; it’s Niki, hovering over him, her hand ever-so-gentle on Dream’s cheek. Her eyes are still swimming with tears, and they squint up when she feels his temperature. “God, he’s burning up so bad, this isn’t normal.”

“He’s not normal,” comes Techno’s familiar drawl. People fly to their feet, ready to fight him for his words, but Dream only finds his friend’s brutal straightforwardness comforting as he continues, “You all know he’s not normal. Hey, not sayin’ it’s a bad thing, just pointing out he  _ literally took Schlatt and Wilbur’s insanity from them _ . Anyone notice Schlatt’s not, say, shootin’ people in the head, and Wilbur’s not threatenin’ arson anymore?”

Schlatt and Wilbur both throw furtive glances at each other; everyone else avoids each others’ eyes. Dream can’t fix memory, and frankly, that’s not something he would ever want to do even if he could; bridges need to be mended by the people on either end, not by an uninvolved third party. All the same, no one’s at each other’s throats; while wary, no one’s hackles are raised from what Dream can see, either, which is exactly what he’d wanted. 

It’s partly the relief cooling the white-hot coursing through him, it’s partly the agony itself, but Dream feels tears collecting at the corners of his eyes, trickling down, and once he starts he can’t stop. 

“Oh jeez, Dream,” says George, panic rising in his voice as he frantically pats Dream’s tears away from the rim of his mask. “Dream, where does it hurt? Are you okay?”

“Oh, obviously he’s okay, George! Are you colorblind or are you plain blind?”

“Sapnap, fuck  _ off _ , I’m being civil! Dream, Dream, hey...”

“Christ, fuck,  _ what do we do?” _

_ “Language _ ... oh, Dream, why...?”

“Someone needs to go get gapples and pots. Hell, all of us should go...” 

“Are they gonna  _ work? _ This isn’t really a conventional injury situation!”

“You got any better ideas? I’m listening!”

Dream is trying to buckle down, to concentrate, even as tears trickle down his face. No god is supposed to do as much as he’s done, and now that he’s done it a traitorous, creeping fear begins to chill him; there are so many things he wants to say, so many things he wishes he could take back, and death is a looming, lunatic thing on his back as he tries to focus. All around him his friends, the people who’ve become his everything, are working themselves into a frenzy trying to reach some vague consensus on what to do, what to say, what to ask. It’s complete chaos. Dream’s tenuous grip on reality is loosening when Tubbo’s clear, calm voice cuts through the cacophony and asks, quiet but kind, “Dream, what are you?”

Everyone drops silent at that. Dream feels his breath catch in his throat, stuck behind the lump that’s getting larger, and it hurts but he’s not sure that articulating his secrets won’t make it hurt worse. He struggles internally for a moment; even though he took their pain from them he doesn’t know if they’ll still love him. 

George’s touch lands butterfly-light on his arm, and the look in his eyes is desperate but fond for all that. “Tubbo’s right,” he murmurs, and over George’s shoulder, his eyes round and distraught, Sapnap nods, his hand clutching Dream’s. “We can’t help if we don’t know. Dream, what are you?”

And, well. 

For them, he’d do anything.

“Minor god,” he whispers, all the adrenaline and the fear and the tension ebbing from him all at once, seeping from him, floating away, away with the admission, his cards strewn faceup over the floor. He thinks someone - several people - shout his name. It’s muffled; he’s falling. “I’m... a minor god.”

A final mercy: he doesn’t even know it hurts when he loses consciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> =)


	24. ....

_down down down falling spiralling he’s alive he’s breathing i don’t know if he’ll respawn deeper down hey hey shh shh it’s okay shh guys where’s somewhere safe aching down to the marrow the mansion the white house the white house danger danger danger no no hey it’s okay shh we have to get there now we can’t pearl we can’t pearl thrash survive keep moving shh shh shh let’s go let’s leave everyone come with come with they’re here they’re here yours yours yours yes there we go shh get water somebody regen and healing if you’ve got it and shh shhhh..._

_safe safe safe loved loved loved_


	25. dream (do you feel like a young god?)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> running, running, running again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heyo. it’s finally over! and i really did do it before the end of 2020, as promised ^^ i love this fic to bits and am really proud of myself; it’s the first multi-chapter fic i’ve ever finished and on such a scale. this fic was definitely a labor of love, and i’m so so grateful to every single person who reads and enjoys it. that said, i have a few special thanks for some people who’ve been here since the beginning:
> 
> Good_Morning_And_Good_Night, for your extra kudos on every chapter. you have no idea what it meant to me. 
> 
> Pinxku, for your kind comments on every chapter. your excitement for each coming chapter was galvanizing.
> 
> HearHearHear, for your thoughtful commentary and clever questions. your empathy for the characters came through in every comment, and i’m so happy you liked the fic as much as you did. 
> 
> subwaywalls, for your chef’s kisses and your poignant predictions. every time you predicted a plot point i got so much more excited for what i could show you. 
> 
> Alice_not_in_Wonderland, for your lovely essay comments that gave me the warm and fuzzies without fail every single time i saw your username pop up in my email. your analyses were always astounding, and i bragged to my friends about you often.
> 
> i definitely didn’t address every person who’s been here forever;;;;;; to everyone, every commenter, every kudos-er, every person who stopped by and thought the fic was cool - thank you from the bottom of my heart!!! it means so much to me :,))
> 
> and huge kudos to CatsandCocoa who popped OFF and predicted several ending points in advance, as well as put a huge analysis in the comments for george’s chapter for anyone who wants to see how the plot-building for the fic went. you touched on a TON of things i put in the earlier chapters as well and i’m so flattered you cared about this story enough to put all that together. 
> 
> you can reach me at @chrysalizzm on twitter and on tumblr - i’ll post bts stuff for young god and maybe some art and story ideas there ;)
> 
> it’s been an honor, everyone! stay tuned for more young god in the future; for now, enjoy the final chapter of you’re human tonight.

The first thing Dream hears when he doggy-paddles his way back into awareness is four variations of snoring.

He’s disoriented as it is, since when he blinks blearily at the ceiling it’s not the spruce paneling of his own base but an unfamiliar stone-brick pattern. When he turns his head to the left with a great effort, the window is limned haphazardly with quartz. Dream attempts to figure out his location and comes up blank. Shrugging mentally - if he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know - he struggles over to his other side and almost has a heart attack.

There are at least eight people in the room with him, all sprawled in various positions and all fast asleep, accounting for the snoring. Inexplicably, the first thing that occurs to Dream is that this must be a massive fire hazard, and it takes him several seconds to depart from that mental image and focus on the people surrounding him.

Bad is tucked into an armchair off to the side, Skeppy slumped on the arm, both sounding like freight trains in different frequencies. Ant and Punz, both surprises, are sprawled on the floor. Schlatt and Eret are asleep on the sofa to the side together, which is another shock to Dream, and for a long, dumbstruck moment he stares at the crowd of people who were sworn enemies not... a day? A week? A month? Ago. Dream tells himself that time is a construct and moves on.

George and Sapnap, of course, are the ones whose chairs are pulled right up to the bed. Sapnap’s hand is clasped firmly around Dream’s, grip certain even in slumber; something knotted behind Dream’s sternum loosens when he sees them both. Even after the lines were drawn, even after Dream had had to point a sword at Sapnap, they tried to stay true to one another, and Dream never once took that for granted. Allegiance means little to gods, but it can be everything to humans, and Dream thinks he’s close enough to feel the same. 

The door creaks open and Dream finds himself blinking at Alyssa, who he hasn’t seen in ages. Alyssa’s hands dart up to her mouth and she’s by his bedside in a flash, wedging herself between George and Sapnap with authority and laying her hand on his shoulder.

“I came as soon as I heard,” she whispers. “Dream, why didn’t you call me?”

Dream’s mouth is dry. He shakes his head, helpless to give her an explanation, cringes when she makes a sudden movement, but she simply pats his cheek and oh. His mask is still on.

Alyssa notices his pause. She notices most things, perceptive to a fault, always able to read her friends better than they could themselves. She offers him a smile, shaky at the corners but still a smile. “They... when I got here, you’d already... You were out like a light. And you still had your mask on. And... while you were unconscious, they only ever, you know... cleaned your face, cleaned your mask... They never once took it off, Dream.”

Something burns, fireball-bright, at the back of his throat. Gratitude, welling up like blood under a bruise. He still doesn’t know what to say, so he tugs at his hand until Sapnap’s death grip eases and takes Alyssa’s hand and clutches it. 

Alyssa’s eyes soften. “They told me, after. What you did.” She doesn’t give Dream room to recoil, barrels on. “You should know before they wake up that - ”

“Big D!” The door opens again, this time with far less gentleness. Dream’s not being dramatic when he thinks he can feel his teeth rattle in their sockets. He can just make out Tommy’s white-blond mop of hair past Alyssa’s arm, and then Tommy’s wide, blinding smirk. Just off to the side is Tubbo’s smiling face, sunny despite its paleness, the brothers standing arm in arm in the doorway. “Look at that! Welcome back to the land of the living!”

The crash of the door hitting the wall roused everyone; even a corpse couldn’t sleep through that. Punz had sat bolt upright and knocked heads with Bad, who’d fallen off of the armchair with a yelp, and now they’re both groaning and apologizing to one another. Everyone’s voices drop off when they see Dream blinking owlishly at them, though.

Finally Dream manages, pained, “...Thought we agreed you’d never call me that again.”

Tommy, not missing a beat, amends, “Welcome back then, Small D.”

Alyssa muffles a snort. Dream briefly considers returning to his however-many-years-long coma. “Why are you like this.”

“It’s my charm point.”

“You’ve got plenty of charm points,” says Tubbo graciously.

“Thank you, Tubbo,” says Tommy smugly, knocking their shoulders together. 

“Dream,” whispers somebody close by, and Dream turns his head to focus on Sapnap and George, who have leaned in closer. Alyssa tactfully retreats a couple of steps, letting Sapnap pull his chair in again, and the three of them stare at one another for a few long moments. It occurs to Dream dimly that this might be uncomfortable for the others in the room. A much louder part of him is completely and utterly fixated on his best friends: the flyaway whorls of black hair barely held back by Sapnap’s white bandana, the faint whisper of stubble, the wide-eyed wonder on his face; George, pale and daring to hope, his dark eyes sparkling behind his clout goggles, the line of his mouth unsteady. Dream wonders briefly if he looks half as dishevelled as they do. Quietly, privately, he wonders what they think of him for what he did, Alyssa’s cut-off words a brand in his mind.

Then Sapnap crows with joy and nearly smothers Dream to death in a hug and it’s all over from there. George is on him not a second later, both practically sobbing, and Dream waves his arms a little helplessly before settling them around Sapnap and George, almost in amazement, and he catches the proud glint in Alyssa’s eyes as she joins the tangled group hug, and then Bad gets there too, and Callahan and Eret and Tommy, of all people, and by the time the hug is over people have seemingly come running in from all corners of wherever the hell Dream has been set up and Dream can’t breathe for how hard he’s laughing and also maybe crying.

“Shit, not more of this, don’t cry,” says Schlatt, deftly ignoring Bad’s scandalized “Language, Schlatt!” and producing a handkerchief from some inner businessman pocket. He passes it to George, who very carefully pats the edges of Dream’s mask down. The practiced air to his movements prompts Dream to ask, “How... how long have I been out?”

In the time it takes everyone to exchange looks, Skeppy pipes up with a nonchalant, “Oh, like, a week?”

Bad makes a sound of wordless outrage and punches Skeppy in the arm; Skeppy draws back and whines, indignant, _“What?_ He asked! He’s the one who’s been playing Sleeping Beauty, he should know!”

“Actually?” asks Dream, surprised. “Shorter than I thought it’d be.”

Silence falls once again, this time filled with horror. “What,” says Quackity, who’d run in about two minutes into the group hug and had thrown himself in with verve.

“You mean to tell me,” says George, deceptively calm, “that this has happened before, Dream?”

Dream winces, realizing his mistake. “Ah - uh - George, you...” he sighs, knowing it’s too late to backtrack. “Yeah, um... Alyssa, Callahan, and Ponk and Sam? And Bad and Sapnap and you, too, George... you all remember when you first joined the world and I wasn’t around for, like, two or three weeks straight?” Dream blows a strand of hair from his face and admits wearily, “It’s because I was recovering from making the world.”

_“You made this one?!”_ demands Eret immediately. When Dream twists to look at them, their eyes are round with shock, a faint glow visible behind their sunglasses. “Dream, you _made this?_ It’s one of the largest worlds I’ve ever been on! Minor gods always make tiny worlds to conserve their power!”

Dream winces at the mention of minor gods. There are good ones, certainly, but a lot are uppity fucks who see themselves as being better than humans, who think their abilities somehow put them above humans, who refuse to reside in worlds not of their creation because they don’t want to relinquish their power. Stupid. Minor gods are no better than humans, in his book; the main reason why he never told a soul he’s a minor god is because he loves humans, loves living like them, loving living amongst them; he and they aren’t so different, and he can serve them way better walking the earth than he could pretending to be some kind of king. “Yeah. Uh.” He feels a flush working up to his face and tries to smother himself into his pillow as he mumbles, “But it was for you guys.”

When he peeks up, he can only really see George and Sapnap, what with them being the closest. He doesn’t at all relish the look of maniacal glee on Sapnap’s face and the genuine, flattered one on George’s. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Aw, he _cares,”_ coos Sapnap, every word dripping honey. Goosebumps rise on Dream’s arms. “Dreamy, you’re such a charmer.”

“I’ll suffocate myself with this pillow,” says Dream, horrified. “I’ll do it, watch me.”

“I’d rather not clean your remains from the White House, mate, thanks,” comes a new voice, and Dream’s eyes dart up to see Wilbur, leaning against the doorframe. 

As soon as he lays eyes on him Dream cries out, uses George’s shoulder for leverage, forces himself to a sitting position even though every possible bone and muscle in his body protests loudly. Niki and Sapnap, both near the bed, try to calm him down, but all Dream can hear is the roaring in his ears. He survived, he woke up early, and he doesn’t know if that means he didn’t take all of Wilbur’s madness, and he surges forward, nearly toppling off the bed amidst several alarmed yells, holds out his hand to the frozen Wilbur

_is he there is he there there there floating rising glimmer in the dark yes yes yes brighter glowing no firestorm no blaze no hate no death_

“ - eam! _Dream!_ It’s fine, okay, shh, I’m right here, everyone’s right here, it’s fine...” Dream blinks and he’s gasping into Wilbur’s shoulder, Wilbur who’s hugging him, murmuring over and over, panic making his voice pitchy, “Shh, shh, shh.”

Everything feels like it’s trembling inside Dream, the tense high after a panic attack. He didn’t even know he had that much energy in him until he expended it trying to attack something that wasn’t there, and he tries not to burden Wilbur or George, who’s got his arm, too much, but soon enough he’s sagging and Wilbur’s laid him down again and everyone’s looking at him like he’s a wounded animal. He opens his mouth and George’s eyes shoot to him and he says, voice tight, “Don’t you dare say you’re sorry.”

Dream’s mouth snaps shut. He can’t bear to look George or Wilbur or Sapnap in the eye, so he settles for staring up at the ceiling until he’s confident his voice won’t waver traitorously.

“...Dream,” says Wilbur presently, his tone deliberate, careful, “can I ask you something?” He pauses, then asks anxiously, “Wait, actually, are you tired? Do you want us to leave you alone?”

Dream’s exhausted, actually, but he can sense the concern and the curiosity everyone’s putting out just fine, and he knows they must have a lot of questions, so, “Nah. Fire away.”

Wilbur works his mouth for a moment, clearly struggling to articulate his question coherently. After a minute, he gives up and asks, “What did you do?”

Dream feels his mask shift on his face as he raises an eyebrow as drily as he possibly can. “Can you be more specific?”

Karl stifles a laugh.

Wilbur scowls, though not so much at Dream as at his inability to communicate the question. “Okay, well, with Phil - everyone knows Phil’s a minor god, right - ” a sea of nods, “ - right, well, Phil taught us pretty much everything there is to know about minor gods. He always said it might be important.” Wilbur gestures a lot as he talks; he’s always spoken with his hands just as much as his mouth. He’s a good orator, a gripping one. “Sorry, bit of a tangent - what I mean to say is: minor gods can only affect things within a world of their creation. That’s, like, basic minor god knowledge.”

“Yeah,” says Dream slowly. 

“Yeah, so, the thing. The - the emotion thing. Like, empathy?” Wilbur blows out a frustrated breath, scratches his head. To the others at large: “You guys know what I’m talking about, right?”

There’s a beat of awkward silence, during which Dream tries and fails to make heads or tails of Wilbur’s word vomit, and then Ant says, low, “That’s not just empathy.”

George and Sapnap both inch aside so Dream can make eye contact with Ant, and Dream is completely unprepared for how incisive his gaze is when he looks Dream over then says, certain, “That manhunt back in August. The raid. I didn’t get it back then, because the whole emotion thing isn’t something minor gods can do. And none of the others heard what you said.”

_The manhunt. Back in August._ Dream suddenly remembers what Ant’s talking about, and he winces involuntarily at the memory. It wasn’t one of his best plans, but it had been his only plan at the time, and he doesn’t regret it; villagers may not be the same as humans but they’re people all the same and his powers as a minor god didn’t want to listen to him that day but his settling has always been at his fingertips so he chose the villagers over him. The least he could give them for dying in a raid he triggered was peaceful passage.

Sapnap’s frowning, and Bad is exchanging looks with George. Wilbur glances between Ant and Dream and says, “What d’you mean? There wasn’t any August manhunt. Not with four hunters.”

“I was new. We were doing a lot of practice runs, and Bad and George and Sapnap were showing me the ropes,” explains Ant evenly, winding his fingers together as he talks, keeping his eyes fixed on Dream. “There was a hunt where Dream accidentally triggered a raid, and when we got to the village, the raid was... over. Or, well... the raid had stopped, at any rate. The villagers were all...” Ant bows his head, and everyone follows suit, and there’s a moment of respectful silence. Dream feels himself choke up a bit again, grateful more than words can say that his friends are as kindhearted as they are, proud to have built a world for them.

Ant clears his throat, rubs the back of his neck, says, “Um, we found Dream, once we got there. It wasn’t pretty.”

“Understatement.”

Dream snorts at Sapnap’s muttered interjection. Ant flashes an indulgent smile before continuing. “Yeah. But the thing is, Dream, you were saying something when we got to you.” Ant’s brows furrow in concentration, but his voice is carefully, consciously devoid of accusation as he says, “What you were saying - you sounded like the way you sounded when you did the... the thing at the festival. You know what I mean? That whispery kind of thing that everyone could hear even though you were way far away on the podium. And... you were talking like you knew what the villagers had gone through.”

Bad’s gaze snaps to Dream so fast Dream’s surprised the man doesn’t get whiplash. “You _didn’t,”_ he says, realization all over his face.

Dream lacks any sense of self-preservation. “Depends on what you think I didn’t do.”

Sapnap slaps both hands to his face and groans in despair. “Idiot,” he says emphatically, nudging Dream none too kindly, and Dream gets the distinct impression that if he weren’t laid up Sapnap probably would’ve punched him. “Complete dumbass. You took their pain! You stopped them hurting when they were about to die.” He pauses, then, his voice strained, “Holy fuck. That’s what you did for me.”

“He _what?”_ demands George, his voice climbing in pitch. Wilbur discreetly escapes from Dream’s side, cringing; Dream shoots him the most betrayed look he can possibly muster.

Sapnap runs his hands through his hair. “The Nether fortress,” he whispers, more at Dream than to him. “When I was dying from the wither effect and neither of us had potions. You - oh my god, fucking stupid!” He swats at Dream’s hair, knowing full well Dream can’t duck away from it, and snaps with no heat, “Why the fuck would you do that? There was no point! I was gonna die anyway, and then the pain would’ve just gone, there wouldn’t have been any pain for anyone ‘cause I respawned and you could’ve just come back! Why the hell would you - _stupid!”_

“Language,” Bad murmurs. Skeppy elbows him.

Dream rolls his eyes so hard he feels a spike of a headache at his temple. “It’s not like I could just sit there and watch you or those villagers suffer,” he says, meaning to yell back but unable to summon the energy for it. “It’s not about being reasonable. It’s my power, Sapnap, and I get to choose how to help.”

Eret muses, “That’s why - the panic attack.” When Dream throws them an alarmed look, they smirk slightly and say, “Hey, I’m not jumping on the ‘Why’d you do that’ train - just thinking out loud.” Lower, more sincere, “But thank you. For doing it. I wish you hadn’t, but there’s no changing it now, so - thank you,” and Dream finds himself blinking faster than he’d like so that George doesn’t have to use the handkerchief again.

“I mean, thanks,” says Sapnap grudgingly after a moment. When Dream perks up, he snarls, “Don’t you do it again, though! I mean it! Fuck off, Dream, don’t do it again! Everyone here thinks so too!” People begin nodding sagely. 

“Wait,” pipes up Niki, frowning. “You’ve done that for me, as well, haven’t you?” She doesn’t wait for Dream to confirm or deny, barrels forward: “The time I threatened you, before Tommy’s duel.”

_“Nihachu!”_ guffaws Tommy. “You _threatened_ him?!”

Niki freezes him with a single glare and turns her attention back to Dream. “You were holding my wrist, I remember. That’s why I - ” Niki raises her eyebrows at Dream. “That’s probably the only reason why I didn’t kill you then, Dream,” she says, a warning in her voice.

Dream bites his lip out of habit, reaches up to his neck with an effort and runs his fingers lightly over the ridged scar pale on his throat. “I,” he says, choosing his words with care, “I know that. I... I didn’t know what to do. You were the most levelheaded person in L’Manberg at the time, and with how angry and frightened you were... I, um... I panicked, a bit. I wasn’t sure what else I could do.”

Niki acquiesces the point with a tilt of her head; they stare at each other for another long moment before blurting at the same time, “I’m sorry,” then staring again until Wilbur says with near-manic cheer, “O-kay! So whilst enlightening, that - that actually wasn’t enlightening at all. Layman’s terms, Dream? Please? For the people who can’t interpret whatever five-way conversation just happened?”

Dream’s big enough to admit he was trying desperately to skirt the point. Asked point-blank, though, there’s not much he can say - he’s not a linguistic acrobat like Wilbur or Schlatt or Techno, and... well, there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for the people crammed into the room with him, watching him earnestly, not a shred of genuine malice in their faces. He sighs, scrubs at his mask; says, careful, “It’s difficult to explain. More of a feeling than something I can put into words, I guess. It’s like... um, I can take people’s pain? Or healing - no, that’s not right. Um, taking people’s hurt, or calming them down, or soothing them... it’s a lot of things... well...” He bites his lip, frustrated with the subpar answer. Holds out his hands, palms up, an invitation, a demonstration of all the things he can’t quite articulate. “It might be better if I show you...?” 

George throws him a suspicious look even as he places his hand in Dream’s and Sapnap takes Dream’s left. “You’re not going to get hurt because of this, right?” he asks.

“Do we all have to maintain contact?” Fundy asks in the same breath, pretending not to eye HBomb warily. HBomb pouts at him, bringing his hands up to his face, curled as if they were paws. Fundy gags. 

“It doesn’t matter if you do, we’re in close enough proximity,” Dream says, ignoring the shenanigans, focusing on the feel of his best friends’ hands in his. As an afterthought, he adds, “No, it won’t hurt me. Probably,” under his breath. 

“Dream - ”

_here here here they are calm calm a peaceful moment a quiet moment shh shh shh safe together all together they’re yours here safe together_

“...oh, _Dream,”_ says George, watery. 

Dream releases the breath he’d held for concentration and opens his eyes, is a little taken aback to see as many teary eyes as he does. 

“Um,” he ventures.

George falls all over him again, and Dream feels the air get crushed out of him once more as people gather round for yet another massive group hug that’s more of a human pileup, and it takes twice as long as the first time for the hug to end because someone will suddenly burst into tears at thirty-second intervals and no one wants to leave a crying person unhugged. 

“You are _horrible,”_ says Ponk with no bite whatsoever, pulling up the bottom edge of his striped mask to wipe at his eyes. “You do all these things for us and you don’t even tell us so that we can properly thank you? God, Dream, you were like this as a kid, too.”

“Don’t bring up kid Dream,” says Sam thickly, accepting Schlatt’s proffered handkerchief (and where the fuck do those keep coming from) and blowing his nose. “I’m emo enough, this is so bad.”

“Okay, but I have to ask,” drawls Techno, one of the few people who remains stoically dry-eyed, sitting on the sofa between Fundy, who's mopping his face with his tail, and Tubbo, who’s rubbing his eyes with the hem of his forest-green shirt. When Dream manages to twist and make eye contact with him, Techno raises an eyebrow. “As touchin’ as the demo was, the fact remains that it’s not a minor god thing. You weren’t born with it, were you, Dream.”

It’s not phrased like a question, and there’s no reason Dream should feel as threatened by the way Techno says it but he feels his hair stand on end as he replies as blithely as he can, “Nope. Why?”

Techno’s gaze softens after a moment; he dips his head briefly, and Dream forces himself to relax. They’ve learned to read each other well, over the several Championships and frequent spars, and Dream knows Techno never intends harm toward the people he cares about. Techno says, gentler, “You don’t have to answer, Dream - it’s not necessary info, or anythin’ like that, but I think it’d be good to know. What’s the source of your - your empathy thing?”

And Dream is eleven again, eleven in the snow and an old god kneeling before him; the old god shimmers brighter than a star and takes his hands and thanks him for loving their creations enough to walk amongst them, reaches out and touches a gentle, gentle finger to the center of his face and breathes a shard of - something, divinity, a blessing, a curse - into him, and he’s eleven and he’s on his hands and knees in the scarlet snow as the old god cards their fingers through his matted curls and tells him to be careful, like they did when he was younger, and he’s eleven and staggering home and he can feel the blood cascading down his face, welling up under the mask, just as well as he can feel the echo of Bad and Sam’s worry and the bruise on George’s knee from tripping two days ago and the scrapes on Alyssa’s face from branches when she was out adventuring and Ponk’s twisted ankle from the mining accident yesterday and Sam is kneeling in front of him and Bad is running for bandages and all he can say is “It hurts hurts _hurts.”_

“Dream?”

“An old god,” he says in a rushed breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. He startles when he feels a hand on his shoulder, but it’s just George, looking at him with those worried, wounded eyes again, and he tries to settle down, calm his racing heart. “An old god, a long time ago. I - they were really... _cryptic_ about it. They just told me that - they said thank you, for walking amongst the humans, and they told me to be careful, and they - ” deep breath, compartmentalize, rationalize, “they touched my face and they gave me... this. Whatever you want to call it. I’ve always called it settling in my head, because it’s easier to say than, like, clairempathy or emotional manipulation, and anyway, that’s not really what it is.”

Immediately, Wilbur says, “We need to call Phil.”

Dream cricks his neck from how fast he shoots a look at Wilbur. “Say what?”

“You heard me.” Wilbur opens up his chat, and by impulse, so do others; Purpled cringes when he scrolls through his, clearly finding a lot of unopened messages, and Skeppy glances at his chat, makes a face, and swipes right back out. “All of this is way over our heads. We need an expert. Actually, we would’ve called him in about you already, but you are just _such_ a paranoid bastard.”

This conversation is going in _so_ many directions. “Wilbur... _what?”_

_You made it so that none of us could invite people to this world without you there,_ signs Callahan long-sufferingly, gesturing to himself, Sapnap, George, and Sam. He tacks on as an afterthought, _You could have made it easier on us, you know! We were all freaking out, trying to put potions down your throat, and none of them actually did anything, so we were running on very unreliable memories from Phil’s kids._

“I’ll have you know that my memory is astounding,” blusters Tommy, his joking tone belying the concentration in his eyes as he follows the movement of Callahan’s hands. “My memory is photogenic, that’s how good it is.”

“Photographic,” says Jack.

“Whatever the fuck.”

“However good Tommy’s memory is, I actually do think there are grounds for calling Phil in,” says Wilbur more seriously, striding over to Dream’s bedside and kneeling between George and Sapnap. “Like, huzzah, you’re a minor god! And we all love and accept you.” Tommy chokes. Wilbur skillfully ignores him. “But the fact of the matter is that something really weird happened in your world, and you’re a self-taught minor god.”

“He might not be a minor god,” says Tubbo thoughtfully. When everyone turns to stare at him, he shrugs and points out, “Or maybe he is a minor god, but with an added feature! The settling is... I guess you would call it a gift? From an elder. Dream’s kind of in middle ground. I’ve never heard about anything like this before, and I’ve done a _lot_ of reading.”

“I mean this in the nicest way, but you can’t read, Tubbo.”

“Listening to people read.”

“Yeah, what he said.” Wilbur nods toward Tubbo, brings his gaze back to Dream, who’s starting to feel a little out of his depth. “Look, Dream... I genuinely think having Phil here is going to be good for everyone, especially you. I know you haven’t met him, but I swear on my life he’s one of the best minor gods, he’s a really good guy, and he can probably figure out what the fuck happened to me and Schlatt, as well.”

The exhaustion is really getting to Dream, now, so he needs a minute or two to process the request, which Wilbur must take as deliberation, because he says, only half-jokingly, “I’m not above using the ‘I really miss my dad’ card, Dream.”

It brings a laugh out Dream; it’s tiring, and his chest kind of hurts once it’s out, but it’s a laugh nonetheless, and George and Sapnap look thrilled, and for the first time in months the people of Dream’s world lack the undercurrent of ache that he’d felt in the heart of the server as soon as war was declared, and... 

And for them, he’d do anything.

Philza’s first impression of the Dream SMP is that it is very, very large.

The spawn point is set up in the center of a lawn of sorts, a looming grey building behind him and half-built walls limning the grass. A quick glance around tells him the land stretches out for chunks upon chunks in every direction, and with the birds chirping and the sun bright and high in the sky, it’s a beautiful day, nothing like the chaos Tommy hinted at in his few messages or the radio silence from Tubbo or the dystopia Techno flatly described when he’d first arrived or the garbled, indecipherable strings of text Phil got from Will up until nine days ago.

Speaking of his sons...

Phil spots the troupe of people making their way over to him from a gaping hole in the wall north of him that looks like it might’ve been made by a creeper. There are ten of them, so probably the rest of the server is off doing their own thing, or maybe one of his kids had told them Phil doesn’t like being mobbed at spawn. Either way, good on them. 

Two people break away from the rest of the group and begin to sprint toward him. Phil feels the grin split his face before he can even make out their features through the glare of the morning sun, and his arms are thrown out wide to catch them as Tommy and Tubbo launch themselves at him with identical crows of delight.

“Phil!! How've you been, big man?!” bellows Tommy, as Tubbo giggles with his face planted into Phil’s chest. Phil notes with a pang that both of them have gotten taller, though the melancholy takes a back seat to elation as he shakes out his wings, spreads his primaries, and envelopes his youngest sons in a flurry of dark feathers.

“Phil!” calls another familiar voice, and Phil looks up to see the rest of the group strolling over to greet him, Wilbur and Techno leading the pack, Wilbur with a childish joy on his face and Techno with a rare, wide smile on his lips. He opens his wings in invitation, and Will doesn’t need to be told twice; he whoops and throws himself into the hug with the same energy as his younger brothers and nearly bowls Phil over. Techno lounges over with far less vigor but the same amount of fondness, and Phil revels in holding his sons as though they were all babies again and he was adopting kids like nobody’s business, a hardcore-born teenaged minor god with too much time on his hands.

Finally, Wilbur breaks away and clears his throat and pats Phil’s shoulders, taller than he has any right to be. “Well, Phil, welcome to the Dream SMP,” he says grandly, then, with a touch of sheepishness, “Here, you ought to meet everyone. Or, well, not everyone, people had to go tend to their plants and whatnot, but some people from the server!”

Phil draws his wings back in again and nods along, offering greetings and exchanging pleasantries, as his eldest introduces the six others one by one. Callahan, who waves and signs rapidly _Nice to meet you_ and brightens when Phil signs back, beaming, _Nice to meet you too._ Punz, who has a firm grip and a sharp grin and who offers to take Phil item farming later if he’d like. Quackity, witty, with an energetic handshake and self-introduction filled with expletives and who Phil can immediately tell Tommy took a shining to. Sapnap, laid-back, his hair in a loose bun, a ghost of stubble on his chin, who rolls up his overlarge sleeve to shake Phil’s hand, showing off the beginnings of a vicious scar on his forearm. George, keen, pushing his clout goggles up onto his forehead so that he can look Phil right in the eye as he introduces himself, which makes Phil like him instantly.

“And this is Dream,” says Will, a thousand unsaid words stirring under his voice, and Phil turns to the boy who saved his sons, who his sons were desperate to save in turn.

He looks pretty bad, if Phil’s brutally honest. He’s tall but he’s relying heavily on George and Sapnap for support, and the cut of his face Phil can see under the mask is pale and clammy and throws his freckles into sharp relief. It looks like someone unused to handling long hair braided it for him. He’s in an oversized hoodie and loose jeans and the edges of white, faded scars peek out from every possible angle and Phil feels a surge of sympathy, of quiet camaraderie; this is a boy who doesn’t fear for his own life.

George says, bravely, “We were hoping you could coach this idiot so that he doesn’t give everyone on this server a heart attack every time he does something remotely godly.”

The boy sighs and says, “It’s not _that_ bad.”

“You had a fever that coulda killed a human being for seven straight days, Dream,” says Techno, deadpan.

“...Well...”

Sapnap rolls his eyes and jostles his friend into silence and looks Phil dead in the eye as he says, “Welcome to the Dream SMP, Philza. We really needed another minor god to beat some sense into this dumbass’s head.”

Phil chuckles, shakes his head, peers at the world owner and creator. The boy’s eyes flicker up for a brief moment, and Phil gets a brief wave of 

_familiar familiar friendly aware awake familiar no pain no fear a friend a father_

“So,” says Phil cheerfully, clapping his hands together, “you’re the young god who saved his server, huh?”

And Dream finally smiles, and it brightens up his entire face, pulls him out of the wan, exhausted state he was in earlier, and he replies, proud, effervescent, “Yeah, I guess I am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this series is definitely getting a drabbles fic where i will take requests/write unwritten scenes in yht and a sequel is also in the works ;))))
> 
> some things that i tried to wedge into this chapter but it was too fuckin' long:  
> -phil may be a minor god, but because the dream smp was created solely by dream, phil can't manipulate the world the way dream does; his wings are mostly for show in the dream smp, he can't actually fly with them there.  
> -sapnap grew his hair out over the course of the fic it's now long enough to put in a bun and good for him tbh  
> -sapnap+quackity+karl wedding and fundy+dream wedding have not yet occurred because uh. war and misery. but dream and gogy are going to brawl over who gets to be best man at sapnaps wedding  
> -dream is on the weaker side, in terms of minor gods, while phil is renowned for being one of the strongest. dream lacks the consistency of his powers (he mentions that his power levels fluctuate) and it takes a lot out of him to do perform certain actions. his most reliable and his most potent power is his settling ;)  
> -the day dream wakes up, everyone on the server camps out in the white house. wilbur plays his guitar nonstop. someone hands out snacks. at some point everyone begins to sing. there's some crying. there's a lot of laughing. at one point, tubbo says, "if you're not a conventional god, dream, don't you think you ought to have a title, like the old gods do?" and dream says, in the region of tired that makes you act inebriated, "isn't that gonna get me smited by the elders," and tubbo laughs and says, "it's an unofficial title! courtesy of your friend tubbo. i think you'd be the god of something kind, or bighearted. god of haven, or mutual safety, or being loved," and dream sighs happily and says, "i like that."
> 
> hey!!!! guys!!!!! before you leave check out this BANGER FANART by Teahound: https://tea-with-veth.tumblr.com/post/637624947702906880/chrysalizzms-fanfic-youre-human-tonight-kept-me she’s the author of _and as he fell (you walked away)_ on ao3 which is a phenomenal fic please go check out her fics too thank!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [all the ashes in my wake](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28926285) by [Marianne_Dashwood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marianne_Dashwood/pseuds/Marianne_Dashwood)




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